Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News

Hitokiri writes "Now that Google News is out of beta the newspaper publishers are starting to take notice. It's important to note that no legal action has taken place yet, but still, there seems to be a battle on the horizon." From the article: "'They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,' Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. 'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"

Comments

Fair Use

[elbenito69]

I'd call it fair use, advertising for the news sources even, but of course I'm probably biased because Google News is just so damn convienent.

Re:Fair Use

[tomhudson]

I'd tell the newspapers to be careful of what they ask for - they might just end up getting it:

'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"

Don't be surprised if at least quoting the first few lines ends up being fair use. Besides, how do they expect their own online content to be seen if it isn't indexed - google could charge them instead of doing it for free. Its not like I'm going to go and find all these news items on my own.

Re:Fair Use

[sirnuke]

I wonder if the newspapers have considered that a majority of Google News reader probably won't go to their site unless the user see an interesting article on google news? Why pay for advertising when you can get someone else to do it for you for free?

I predict...

[xstonedogx]

...that Google's response will be, "If you don't want to be listed, you don't have to be listed. Bye."

It amazes me how willing people are to shoot themselves in the foot.

Re:Copyright violation?

[interiot]

The fair use doctrine has been described as a murky concept in which it is often difficult to separate the lawful from the unlawful.

Also, most fair-use cases fall under comment-and-criticism... eg. it's okay to use one image of Homer Simpson on the Homer Simpson Wikipedia page, because that's one way to identify Homer while commenting about him.

Also, fair use says that companies that profit off of other's copyrighted work, and especially companies who diminish the profits of the copyright holders, is unlikely to have a judge rule in their favor.

Re:Not very clever of them.

[amazon10x]

I think the reason they are so upset with this is because it makes the competitors more available.

Let's assume that Bob enjoys reading news on the internet. However, Bob does not know of these things referred to as "portals". Rather than pulling up 10 different windows (using internet explorer (Bob is an idiot, BTW) which makes it worse) for NYTimes, Washington Post, MSN, Yahoo, his local paper, and some others, Bob takes the lazy way out and uses only the NYTimes site because he doesn't like swapping windows.

Now Bob's friend comes along and tells Bob to go to news.google.com to get his news. Bob acquiesces and reads Google News from here on. Now Bob gets to see hundreds of different news sources rather than just the NYTimes. This is bad for the NYTimes so they sue Google.

I am not saying I agree with them suing, I believe it is fair use. However, I do see why they're suing.

"Shooting themselves in the foot" is right

[GPS Pilot]

Thanks to Google News, I've made hundreds of visits to news organizations' web sites that I wouldn't otherwise have made. And on all of those visits, I've viewed ads for which the news organizations earned money.

Silly journalists...

What would this mean for Slashdot?

[Disposable Rob]

"'They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,' Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. 'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"

Except for the occasional unique content like interviews, doesnt this describe Slashdot? Along with Fark, Digg and countless blogs whose entire sites who report what others are reporting, except they use people instead of Google's crawlers.