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60M Euro Smooths Relations Between Google and French Publishers
New submitter Flozzin writes with news of some resolution to the long-standing dispute that some French publishers have had with Google for republishing snippets of news reports without sharing revenue earned from the ads run alongside. Now, reports the BBC, "Google has agreed to create a 60m euro ($82m; £52m) fund to help French media organisations improve their internet operations. It follows two months of negotiations after local news sites had demanded payment for the privilege of letting the search giant display their links. The French government had threatened to tax the revenue Google made from posting ads alongside the results."
Google is not paying for the "privilege" of showing links to newspapers on its search engine. They are paying because they created Google News which uses snippets of those stories to create a valuable news web site that brings in significant advertising revenue and traffic to other Google services.
The newspapers argument is that they built a news site for free using other people's content. If you go to the Google search page it doesn't tell you the news, you have to know it already in order to search for it. Google News gives you what the newspapers consider valuable information for free, using their content as a source. Additionally they are claiming that the click-through rates are very low because the multiple headlines and snippets often give people as much information as they want.
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Google should have just told them "you don't want us showing your links? Ok, have it your way", and dropped them into oblivion.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I get the feeling Google paid this because the revenue from the adverts was more than 60m...not because the newspapers "won" in court.
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Seems to me that the newspapers didn't have a leg to stand on, and Google gave them a face-saving concession to let everyone walk away with their heads held high.
Google doesn't really care about the $60m, it's a fairly small sum, doesn't set a terrible precedent, and saves them the time and effort of fighting this battle.
Meanwhile, the government has achieved a concession and can walk away without an embarrassing loss of face.
Finally, the newspapers can opt out of google news using their robots.txt if they want to (as they always could).
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Crap argument. robots.txt is not about permission to copy and republish, but about permission to crawl and index.
That is a complete bullshit argument, not surprising to see one from an anonymous coward like yourself with such bad ideas. Who gives a flying fuck who can crawl and index? The argument is over republishing of portions of content, without which search engines cannot function. If your argument is that we should break the internet, it's an exceptionally bad one and not just stupid and wrong as we have already established.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"