Newspapers put legal crosshairs on Google
From Reuters UK:
A group representing global newspaper publishers has launched a lobbying campaign to challenge search engines like Google that aggregate news content…The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to “challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.” Web sites like Google and its specialised Google News service automatically pull in headlines, photos and short excerpts of articles from thousands of news sources, linking back to the publishers’ own site. Google News does not currently carry advertising.
I guess free traffic isn’t good enough compensation?
Hardly free traffic, it’s traffic that would have found it’s way to those news site otherwise.
Especially with taking their images, I do believe Google is being a bit of a leach.
S
Comment by Steve — February 1, 2006 @ 1:07 am
I disagree. If it’s only “short excerpts” of the articles, the visitors would have to visit the site if they wanted to read the whole scoop anyways. I think these newspapers are just looking for something to complain about.
Google should just ban their sites from the search engine and Google News for a month or two and see what happends. heh
Comment by Sean — February 1, 2006 @ 6:49 am
Yes, let the market work. Allow newspapers to opt out of the service. They’ll get far less traffic, and the newspapers that stay in will get far more traffic.
Comment by Chris Beasley — February 1, 2006 @ 11:20 am