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Google CEO Warns Newspapers Not To Anger Readers

Posted by Soulskill on from the hand-that-feeds dept.

Barence writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hit back at newspaper bosses, warning them that they risk alienating readers in their war against news aggregators such as Google News. 'I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants,' Schmidt said at a conference for the Newspaper Association of America. 'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.' Schmidt's rebuke follows a sustained attack on Google by newspaper bosses such as Rupert Murdoch, who have accused the search giant of 'stealing' their content without payment." Schmidt also suggested that newspapers need to expand their distribution methods to make better use of mobile technology, and a NY Times piece argues that the Associated Press' struggle against aggregators is futile since they're largely trying to give news stories to consumers for free anyway.

2 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative
    On his blog, entitled "Google Public Policy", Alexander Macgillivray weighed in as well (and since he's Associate General Counsel for Products and Intellectual Property for Google this may have more weight than the CEO).

    He makes a pretty common argument that Google News actually helps every news service as opposed to the AP's claims of hurting them (maybe even stealing from them).

    And then he defaults to fair use:

    In the U.S., the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the US Copyright Act allows us to show snippets and links. The fair use doctrine protects transformative uses of content, such as indexing to make it easier to find. Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index -- all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards such as robots.txt or metatags.

    And remember folks, he is a lawyer (although I am not).

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog by russotto · · Score: 5, Informative

      Ah, the state of corporate America these days. When the options boil down to - spending 20 minutes of a computer analysts time to put a proper robots.txt file up or spend tens of thousands of dollars to drag another company into court - and you pick the latter option?

      What's the real motive here?

      Putting up robots.txt doesn't solve the problem. That gets them off Google and the other aggregators, but doesn't get them what they want, which is either

      1) To prevent Google and the other aggregators from aggregating at all (otherwise, having everyone but themselves on Google is pretty much corporate suicide)
      or
      2) To force Google to both aggregate AND to pay them for it.

      Unfortunately for them, 2) pretty much requires legislative action. Even if they were to get the courts to declare aggregation to be copyright infringement, Google could just cut a deal with the smarter and/or more hungry papers to aggregate their stuff for free, leaving the whiners out in the cold with neither direct revenue nor eyeballs.