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Google Reveals Payment Deal with AP
mytrip writes to mention a ZDNet article concerning a deal Google has struck with the Associated Press. The search company has ended a dispute between the two organizations by agreeing to pay for the articles and content it delivers via its Google News service. From the article: "Financial terms were not disclosed. Consequently, it's unclear whether the deal involves a flat fee or paying AP according to traffic statistics. On the surface, paying the Associated Press seems to conflict with the stance Google has traditionally taken regarding its Google News service. Because Google News is an aggregator, the company has argued, Google is not obliged to reimburse news outlets for linking to their content. But Wednesday's announcement said the AP content will be the foundation for a new product that will merely complement Google News. Thus Google maintains that the deal supports its original stance on fair use."
Anybody else thinking of running a news aggrigator will eventually have to lay out the cash. This is how capitalism works, you take something availiable to everybody and put a fence around it. In the case of computing, the fence is simply a barrier to entry, see also software patents.
Sounds like they'll actually be delivering whole AP articles, rather than snippets with links. Which might mean people wouldn't have to go to regular newspaper/TV-news sites to get those AP articles they all regurgitate.
We may soon find out just how much those sites were "hurt" by being linked from Google News, once they lose that sweet AP article traffic...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
A minor correction concerning the 20% figure (revenue of AP from online content) - BusinessWeek say it should be 14%.
The AP-Google deal is for a future news product not the current news content that is used in the current Google product. A reuters article explains. From the Reuters article, "'It's a licensing agreement that lets us use original AP content in new ways than we have used in the past for Google News,' Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv said."
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From what I saw on the Associated Press's website (http://www.ap.org), they have no free access to their news content. I would guess that Google's aggregator has been getting its AP - and all other - content from the AP's customers, such as the New York Times and other large newspapers. The good thing about pulling from several of these sources is that a variety of sides to one issue show up in Google News. I'm worried that Google's new deal with the AP will lead to a direct pipe for AP articles in whatever the new product is. Every source has its biasses and a domination of AP content could lead to a deterioration of the level view I'm used to getting by seeing a number of articles on the same subject throgh Google news.
... several other newspapers have tried to sue google for linking to their stuff with tiny excerpts.
I've never understood the "deep linking" controversy or -- more to the point -- how linkees had any cause to object. But I guess at least here the issue is "tiny excerpts". How tiny? Full text would clearly be a copyright violation. So, how tiny does an excerpt have to be in order to qualify as fair use? At least that's a reasonable basis for dispute, as opposed to linking itself.
It seems to me that Google might be paying AP for something that stretches beyond fair use, and it certainly is claiming fair use vs. the several other newspapers.
Google stopped indexing AFP content from the past agreement. I wonder how well that worked out for AFP's numbers? My guess is they took a nosedive, leading to this more of a compromise deal with AP.
If you think about it, google could wipe out just tons of online news sites if they wanted to. Podunk and east buggywhip little news paper sites can afford to pull wire feeds. Google could do the same and just *drop* any places that are just redundant coverage of the same story once they have paid for it. They get copy and images from the feeds, so no real reason to index all those other places. Pull up any google news article, take a gander at the "all xxx-number related" links. Looks like around 99% identical to me. For that matter, they could hire freelancers by the droves around the planet and give a lot of the old established press services a thorough scare. Be a reporter, actually get looked at on the net with some numbers, stick with the old school news services, be limited to dead trees print if lucky. I bet a lot of the current freelancers that the wire news feeds use would jump ship quickly given that choice.
I don't know if they could do this without inking the deal, but quite often the majority of news stories in a single entry on Google News are copies of the same AP news wire article. Perhaps this will give Google an opportunity to mark articles as the same, or somehow reduce clutter.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
AP are scared of Google "competing" with them? When Google hires thousands of journalists to write news for their site then they are competing with AP. What they are doing is not competition. Google is effectively the Napster of news. They take news from all over the world and let people get free access to it.
That is fine for sites that offer free news, but AP doesn't. If you think what Google is doing is A-OK, try to imagine what it will be like when one of the world's largest news agencies goes under. This is not like music copyright infringement where a few rich bands lose money they don't need. When journalists disappear governments become less accountable.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?