Say Anything Blog

Interesting...

DUBLIN (Reuters) - A group representing global newspaper publishers has launched a lobbying campaign to challenge search engines like Google that aggregate news content.

The move comes as the newspaper industry's traditional business model is under pressure with advertising spending shifting away from print and towards the Internet.

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.

"They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content," Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview.

I'm not sure that their lawsuit has a whole lot of merit.  Google News is, obviously, nothing more than a search engine aimed specifically at news sites.  They index news articles and then allow internet users to search across a broad range of online publications.  However, users must click on a link to the original news site to get more content than a simple headline and excerpt.  That seems like fair use to me.

That last quote, about Google building something new on the "backs" of an established industry is interesting for that pretty much sums up the company's business model.  After all, where would Google be without the billions upon billions of websites it indexes every day?

I think these online publishers are fools to take on Google in this way.  There is no copyright infringement taking place and their online publications will undoubtedly get more traffic with Google indexing them than without.  Getting rid of Google News (and similar products) wouldn't do anyone any good.