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German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets
itwbennett writes German publishers said they are bowing to Google's market power, and will allow the search engine to show news snippets in search results free of charge — at least for the time being. The decision is a step in an ongoing legal dispute between the publishers and Google in which, predictably, publishers are trying to get compensation from the search engine for republishing parts of their content and Google isn't interested in sharing revenue. The move follows a Google decision earlier this month — and which was to go into effect today — to stop using news snippets and thumbnails for some well-known German news sites.
They wanted Google to give them revenue or stop using their articles. So Google said, fine we will stop using your articles, good luck when you lose 65% of your daily hits since we know they come through us...
"Wait wait wait! We still want the free advertising that comes from Google's use of our content! We just want Google to pay us for the privilege of giving us a service we would otherwise have to pay for, in exchange for displaying content we already give away for free online!"
Sad. I get so sick of people griping about the effects of Amazon and Google (etc), without giving a second thought to just how much they already get in return for the relationship. Same idea goes for Amazon and Hachette - They have every right to refuse to sell at the price Amazon wants; they'll just never sell another eBook.
They didn't think it was bad. That's evident based on this story.
They wanted Googles money and tried to exploit outdated laws written 100yrs ago to modern technology to try and extort that money. You know, like what every other media organization that's currently dieing because of the internet is trying to do.
It's no different than the last publisher that went and got a court order forbidding Google from displaying any of their content (not realizing what that meant). A week after Google pulled everything from the index and their traffic had dropped of 95% they called up Google and offered to cut a deal (which I highly doubt Google paid a dime for).
Personally I think Google should just take a hard line in these states like Germany and require a signed document authorizing their use in perpetuity or they yank the entire site from all their indexes. If they did it to the entire German industry all at once I doubt the state could claim it was an anti-trust violation because they would be treating everyone equally.