Slashdot Mirror
Content Owners to Charge Royalties for Searching?
dwarfking writes in with a story that follows up on the impact of recent Google events: "Ok, maybe I'm a little dense here, but isn't this plan more of an impact to the content provider than to the search engines. From the article: 'In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.'
So, ok, a search engine company decides it doesn't want to pay royalties and therefore doesn't index the provider's site. Now won't the provider actually lose readers since their articles won't be locatable by search anymore?"
Sounds like one of the dumbest ideas I have heard, this goes alongside the MPAA and RIAA shenanigans.
So using the courts they have failed to get royalties and achieved what they could have achieved with some robots.txt files.
Evil people are out to get you.
There's really not much more to say about this. Let 'em wallow in their own stupidity, and they'll come around. Sometimes, like children, you have to let someone learn the hard way, and they'll never do it again. :)
:(
"You'll shoot your eye out! You'll shoot your eye out!"
Side note - anyone else lose their login cookie this morning only forced to log back in and fill out a captcha? Weirdness. Worse, I saw no option for the visually impaired to log in either. Tsk tsk tsk....guys, come on. I'm not meaning to toss flames around, but you've got to provide some sort of opt-out link for those who can't see your captcha images.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Sounds like rounds for suing the search engine for lost revenue to me !
"Your honor, by refusing to pay our fee the search engine is not only depriving us of our fair due, but also giving an unfair competitive advantage to our competitors. We demand that they add us to their search database and pay our very reasonable fee for accessing our pages."
And if anyone mods me funny, well... that's one naive fellow, then.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You mean like robots.txt?
This sounds like willful ignorance. All the search engines mention it as the method to avoid having particular content indexed. They might not read RFCs but a quick peek at the help pages on the search engines in question would've answered this (and squashed the lawsuit) in no time.
My spoon is too big.
Let's just shut down the net. Damn thing has been nothing but trouble since the beginning. We probably should outlaw all communications that don't provide more income for the content "owners". That means no more printing, writing, singing, painting, talking...anything. If we don't want to give all our money to these damn people, we should shut the hell up, right?
And put in your earplugs
put on your eyeshades
you know where to put the cork...
Oops, there goes another violation.
What?
I don't see this as making money on other's content. Google does link you back to the main story. It does not display a cached version.
Google is making money on their unique ability to gather, index, and make sense of all of the seperate news articles being created. They can show you news stories about related items from different sources around the world. They are making money on the service which lets you actually see the news from different points of view.
This is very different, and the content creators had nothing to do with this. This is a service on top of their service, and they deserve nothing from it. Google does provde the opt out option either by contacting them, or by simply using the robots.txt.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
"What is required is a standardized way of describing the permissions which apply to a Web site or Web page so that it can be decoded by a dumb machine without the help of an expensive lawyer."
They already have this. It's called the robot.txt file. You can use it to tell search bots not to index you. This just seems to be a richer permissions model, that includes things like caching and excerpting options.
In the longer term, I agree that this hurts content providers more than Google. Overall, it makes the search index less useful. However, it makes the content unfindable. Content that uses this will simply be replaced by content that does not.
Why would Google pay to provide better search results for content? It would make more sense for them to pay for the content direct so that they could have an exclusive. Or for content to pay to appear in the search results, like with Yahoo.
There will always be smaller news outlets who want to get additional daily viewers. They want Google to direct people to their site. If the large news organizations want to opt out, there will always be someone to take their place.
When you look at Google news, you see a brief summary of the news article and then when you click on it, you are directed to that website. The website will earn revenue from their advertising. If they have an attractive and useful website, people may go to their site directly. New unique users. Often I find that after I've read an article I found through a search, I will go to the homepage of the site (through the hacking known as modifiying the URL) and look at their other articles. Most websites would pay Google to have links to them, now some sites want to Google to pay them? Google will just ignore them and their competitors will prosper.
Doesn't slashdot do something similar. Someone reads something interesting on the web and suddenly there's a link to it. I'm sure if some sites wanted to charge a fee to slashdot, they would promptly be ignored.
The idea that comes to mind is revenue stream. Someone working for the news organizations came up with the thought "Google has lots of money, let's take it" and so it began.
"hese media outfits have very talented economists, financialists, and lawyers working for them. These are people who can accurately predict what will happen if the media companies were to take this course of action. They know how consumers will respond, and they know how it will affect their company's bottom line."
I hope you're just trolling. Most analysts in any field aren't worth shit when it comes to making predictions. That's why there are so many product failures every year, and why for every winner in the stock market, there's at least one loser.
Media people are among the most clueless. Take a look at how many movies bomb, at how many magazines die every year, how many tv shows don't go beyond the first season, how many newspapers are having to cope with declining readership
http://www.naa.org/marketscope/pdfs/Sunday_Nationa l_Top50_1998-2005.pdf Sorry, its one of those darned pdfs.
Sample stats:
1998 - 135,000,000 adult population, 92,000,000 readers
2005 - 150,000,000 adult population, 89,000,000 readers.
So, while the potential market has grown more than 10%, their readership has declined 4%.
Many companies with supposed "very talented economists, financialists, and lawyers working for them" have done things that failed. Look at Sony and their rootkits? In 1986 many "very talented economists, financialists, and lawyers" commented buying a PC software only company, Microsoft, would be a very bad investment. Many people said the same thing about a company that sells over priced coffee -- Star Bucks. A very talented manager at HP ridiculed Steve Wozniak when he designed a personal computer.
Fight Spammers!
"The problem is that the search engines aren't TRYING to be publishers."
Sorry, but that just isn't true.
Yahoo quite obviously is a publisher. In fact, Yahoo has formal distribution agreements in place with many news providers, including a number of major newspapers, and pays agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press a considerable amount of money in licensing fees. The same is true of MSN and AOL.
You may not regard Google as a publisher, but it is. The problem is that Google publishes content that belongs to others.
Google scrapes content from websites and constructs news presentations that include headlines, photographs and summaries that do not belong to Google. It does not secure permission to reuse that content. It doesn't pay the writers or the editors or the photographers or the news agencies.
I'm not at all convinced that the Belgian newspapers are responding to the situation in the right way. But a knee-jerk reaction that Google is good and the publishers are bad is very naive.
If you look at Google's scattered EULAs and TOS documents you'll discover that they are very one-sided. Google can take your content and make pages containing ads. You can not take Google's content (RSS feeds, for instance) and make pages containing ads. If you sign up for Google's advertising programs you're not allowed to disclose certain information about the program to others. You can't put Google Adsense on the same page as any other content-targeted advertising. And so on.
Sauce for the goose is apparently not for the gander. From the Google News terms of service: "For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service."
Google has made great hay out of its "Do No Evil" slogan, but some of its practices, such as collaborating with governments that do not recognize the fundamental human right of freedom of speech, make me wonder.
The argument that search indexing is good for publishers has also several problems.
First of all, whether it's good or bad for the publisher isn't relevant to the question of legality. If I steal an apple and tell 40 friends how good it is, the market may actually gain new customers and come out ahead. But I'm still stealing an apple. The question of whether Google's screen-scraping amounts to apple-stealing is one for the courts to resolve, and apparently the Belgian courts have taken a position not friendly to Apple.
Second, the typical Slashdot poster's naive assumption that traffic == wholesome goodness isn't true. It doesn't work that way.
Most newspapers, for historical reasons, have an economic model that is built on advertising by businesses that are trying to reach specific customers in a highly restricted geographic region. This is particularly true in the United States; models vary in other countries, but most have a strong regional press.
Because of the global nature of the Internet, the vast majority of traffic brought in by search engines is of no interest to local and regional advertisers.
"Noise" traffic actually works against the site by depressing clickthrough rates and lowering the apparent effectiveness of CPM-based advertising.
As I said, I'm not jumping onto the Belgian publisher's bandwagon, but I'm also not jumping onto Google's. This is not so simple as that.
Perhaps his point was that 99% of the slashdot readers are judging this decision based off a 3 sentence summary and about 30 seconds of thought (if that), whereas educated people have been paid to put hours of thought into the decision, which may have some sort of long-term or tangential strategy. It's easy to judge the decision, but maybe there is more to what is going on than we know.
At the same time, my first reaction is that this is retarded.