Newspaper Lobbyists Take Aim at Google News

Hitokiri writes "Now that Google News is out of beta the newspaper publishers are starting to take notice. It's important to note that no legal action has taken place yet, but still, there seems to be a battle on the horizon." From the article: "'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. 'The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not.'"

Fair Use

[elbenito69]

I'd call it fair use, advertising for the news sources even, but of course I'm probably biased because Google News is just so damn convienent.

What does Beta have to do with anything

[Tweekster]

Honestly, Just cause google called it beta before and now it doesnt did not change anything legally. They were still open for legal attack just as much then as now (which is yet to be determined) In all likelyhood they have nothing to worry about since they are simply aggregating data and well that is a use under copyright. Newspapers, quite bitching,. most people wouldnt even read your particular site if it werent for google News.

Re:Fair Use

[grogdamighty]

Yeah, I fail to see how this is really any different from a newstand: headlines and teasers are used to lure you to the publisher's website. Why complain about free advertising?

Google does as paper does

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean Google is doing what every media outlet has done?
Built a news medium on the backs of other people lives, without paying for any of the content. When was the last time the news reporter payed you after publishing an article reporting your car accident, or that you were being sued.

I'll remember this statement.

[IAAP]

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."

I'll rmember that the next time I see an article in their papers that's almost verbatim to the Reuters or AP wire feed.

Fucking hypocrites.

I predict...

[xstonedogx]

...that Google's response will be, "If you don't want to be listed, you don't have to be listed. Bye."

It amazes me how willing people are to shoot themselves in the foot.

Not very clever of them.

[microarray]

From TFA:"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."

Some companies PAY for a little link to their site to appear when there is a relevant Google search. These newspapers get indexed, and linked to, from a high traffic site, for FREE, and they are complaining. Instead of throwing lawyers at the problem, they should engage their brains for a moment and figure out which option is better for their business.

The problem with most newspapers

[w3woody]

I think the problem with most newspapers is that by and large, they are news aggregators, not news reporters. Most local newspapers have a staff of reporters who go out and report local news--but for the bulk of their content they rely upon content that is not written in-house. (Wire services such as Reuters, AP and UPI, along with syndicated columns, form the bulk of most newspapers today--which means that many of the national articles in the Fresno Bee, say, are the same articles that appear in the Washington Post.)

So while it's sort of simplistic to say that this is all fair use, the reality is that Google News, by making a better mouse trap (dynamic news aggregation) is--probably without even realizing it--competing head to head with local newspapers.

Robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet has ways that the news companies can use if they don't want Google crawling them.
By not stopping Google by using the standard mechanism, I'd agree that it is fair use for Google to use the data they provide.

Why do I get the feeling...

[Guppy06]

That by "newspapers" we're talking about the New York Times, the Washington Post, and not much else? It seems that, more often than not, the first link for a particualr news story is a smaller newspaper that doesn't exactly have a nationwide readership, giving their sites (and banner ads) far more traffic than they'd have without news aggregators. The only papers I could see complaining are the ones that already have their own national and/or global distribution channels.

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[greenstork]

The key difference being that those newpapers you mentioned actually pay for AP and Reuters content while Google does not pay anyone for news featured.

I suspect

[gr8_phk]

"...that Google's response will be, "If you don't want to be listed, you don't have to be listed. Bye."

It amazes me how willing people are to shoot themselves in the foot."

I suspect the larger news sources would rather have the practice halted completely. This would force people to go to a major news site (them) rather than google which sometimes leads people to lesser news sites. Slashdot has been linked from a Google headline more than once. Big news sites don't want people to be aware of any alternatives.

Smaller news sources probably like the publicity Google provides them. Larger news sources probably don't like the publicity Google provides those smaller competitors.

They don't want to opt out, they want it all to just go away.

Re:Fair Use

[sirnuke]

I wonder if the newspapers have considered that a majority of Google News reader probably won't go to their site unless the user see an interesting article on google news? Why pay for advertising when you can get someone else to do it for you for free?

if i go to a newstand

[circletimessquare]

i can scan the front page headlines of about 10 different newspapers without buying a newspaper. but if i am interested in knowing more in depth, i'll buy the newspaper

if i go to google news, same thing: i can scan the front page headlines of about 10 different newspapers without visiting the newspaper's site. but if i am interested in knowing more in depth, i'll click on the link and go to the newspaper's site

are newspapers now going to prohibit people from looking at newsstands unless they intend to buy a newspaper?

this is utterly ridiculous. do newspaper sites want no traffic? how the heck do they expect people to find their stories?

Other sites

[Chowderbags]

What about a site like Drudge Report? Or even any blog out there? Sure, they may not be as automated as Google, but will the courts see it that way? I hardly see it as an issue of copyright if a site not only cites a source, but links back to get the whole story. Besides, this is the industry that thrives on AP and Reuters stories to fill most of it's content. Well, that and the random reporters that steal from Wikipedia: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/15/151321 6 [slashdot.org]

"Shooting themselves in the foot" is right

[GPS Pilot]

Thanks to Google News, I've made hundreds of visits to news organizations' web sites that I wouldn't otherwise have made. And on all of those visits, I've viewed ads for which the news organizations earned money.

Silly journalists...

Re:Am I missing something?

[McGiraf]

"Am I missing something?"

Yes, the ads, you must be using adblocker or something.

How is this?

[rm69990]

Someone please explain to me how this is any different than Google Search indexing these exact same articles and making the first few lines available through their search engine? Or Google images making these exact same images available from Google's servers?

Either way, Google is still directing web traffic to their sites. There are a lot of news articles on various sites I would have never read if it weren't for Google news. I don't have time to track thousands of different online news outlets, so Google does it for me. I have even *gasp* clicked on ads after being redirected to the news vendors website. Even more shocking, there has been a few (5 actually) news outlets who's RSS feeds I have subscribed to after reading a few articles of theirs linked to from Google News.

Oh well, there are no laws against stupidity. This is almost as dumb as book publishers getting in a panic over Google Book Search, which is free advertising as far as I'm concerned. Or do they fear people will be satisfied with the page shown on Google Book Search and not buy the full book? Generally, when I want to read a book, I want to read the full book. The same thing with the news. I don't read the Google News homepage and not go to the full source.

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[Tweekster]

so what? that sounds exactly fair. Google is giving the person a teaser, a tiny bit of the info, useless on its own Reuters etc is giving the whole piece of content. there is a very clear and gaping distinction between the two

Re:Fair Use

[tomhudson]

The newspapers are SCARED. They're caught between a rock and a hard place. Consider:

1. Their product is environmentally destructive, expensive to distribute, and out of date by the time they ship it
2. They're in a highly competitive market, so they have to sell the product for, at best, break-even on the manufacturing costs, and make it up in advertising. Net-based competitors don't have the high startup costs, and the high printing and distribution network costs, and they're competing for the same advertising dollars.
3. Unlike newspaper advertising, where a person might not even SEE section of the newspaper where your ad is, but its factored into the cost of your ad anyway, on the net yo can have EXACT metrics of who say your ad, and who ACTED on it. This is feedback that scares the newspaper chains sh*tless.

Which side would YOU rather be on ...

Re:Fair Use

[Cal Paterson]

Most of these newspapers seems to be only interested because they think they may be able to get money out of sueing Google. If Google offered this as some kind of advertising agreement which they paid for, my guess would be that it would be pretty popular.

Re:Google does as paper does

[Software]

Hmm, I don't recall any car accidents I've been in where I've taken pictures, then interviewed policemen, passersby, EMTs, and doctors. Then I didn't aggregate their responses, filter out the unimportant stuff, and write a coherent story of what happened. Since I haven't done any of that, I wouldn't expect to be paid as if I had.

I don't know if whether Google's usage is "fair use" or not. But it's not fair to say that journalists "built a news medium on the backs of other people lives, without paying for any of the content". They maintain their medium by researching the events and describing them for people who weren't there, and that's a service that many people (myself included) find valuable and willing to pay for. Journalists don't just regurgitate whatever they're told*.

* Certain former New York Times reporters (*cough* Judith Miller *cough*) excepted.

These people are stupider than the RIAA

[voss]

I would NEVER read their newspaper websites if it were not for
Google News. Google news gives them free pagehits which exposes
their newspaper and their web page ADVERTISERS to a larger audience.

If I were a newspaper publisher I wouldnt be angry about my newspaper
being in Google news, I would be angry about my newspaper not listed
among the first three sources.

All google news is a News search engine with links to news sites.

My god Google news is GIVING YOU BUSINESS without charging you....
Google news has your newspaper websites RELEVANT again...more so
than TV news. Are you newspaper publishers really that fracking
STUPID as to punish them for it?

Re:I suspect

[gknoy]

If Google were to make it an opt-in (or out, even) service for news sites, and free, the smaller news sites might flock to it, ensuring publicity -- whereas the larger sites will simply opt out.

But I'd rather see if this is ruled fair use. :)

Re:Fair Use

[jez9999]

I'd rather be a newspaper. You seem to be forgetting that they too can compete on the net and just drop the physical paper when/if it gets too unprofitable. Not sure why you're thinking internet-only news operations have an advantage there.

Re:Fair Use

[Buran]

Bingo.

Gee, let's see. Would I rather pay 50 cents (or whatever it is) to get a space-wasting dirty tree-killing truck-polluting pile of paper with an erroneous "Miners rescued alive" headline, or view the news, no clutter/pollution/tree-killing required, online, with the CORRECT INFORMATION?

Plus, I can read what I want, be linked to other sources, read in the order I want without having to make piles all over the floor, worry about pages being out of order, and I can even easily e-mail links or text of stories to others.

Gee. I think I'll stay a web reader for a good long time.

Theft, pure and simple

[Nom du Keyboard]

What a crock! You've put the stuff out there for free. Google makes your content a million times more findable. And now your intent is to rob them for being a value added supplier simply because they have a lot of money that you want. Newspapers are the thieves in this, pure and simple.

If you don't like being indexed, put a frigging robots.txt file on your site and watch how much you'll be saving in bandwidth costs afterwards as your traffic plummets.

The newspapers not only need to lose on this one -- they need to lose big!

Re:Copyright violation? Why wait? $$$

[Nom du Keyboard]

Why wait this long? Google News has been running for YEARS, albeit with the 'beta' moniker.

Because Google has lots of money now, and they want to get their hands on it. Rule number 1 in laywer school: Don't sue poor people because they can't pay.

Re:you're very confused

[thirdrock]

Google doesn't pay for linking to them and uses advertising to subsidize their non-payments.

You're not a very accomplished liar are you? Show me one advertisement on news.google.com and you might have a point.

Since when have you ever paid for an AP or Reuters news story online. The news sites posting them pay for them, and use advertising to subsidize.

Yes, and they create almost no news of their own. In other words, what Google is showing is that all of these so called 'NewsPapers' are nothing more than distribution channels for syndicated news. Or to put it another way, there is no reason to buy one newpaper as opposed to any other.

I think the real issue here is that the concept of the 'Newspaper' is dying. With the Internet, news is obiquitous, instantaneous and democratic. One can invision a future where consumers will subscribe to a single news service and then filter by region, topic etc. All journalists will then be working for the syndication companies.

This turns the whole news business model upside down. Currently, "The New York Times" is a brand that is used to sell advertising space to corporate advertisers. There is a huge vested interest in sustaining this model for a number of reasons.
1) Advertisers influence the type of news that is printed. In other words, the flow of information is influenced, nay corrupted, by the corporate world.
2) Huge amounts of money have been invested into these news 'brands'. Changing the model dilutes the value of the brand,effectively causing a capital loss.
3) Following on from (1), information flow influences political thought. If the newpaper influences political thinking, and advertisers influence the newspaper, then the advertisers (corporations) indirectly influence political thought. This is a powerfull lever that nobody would want to give up.

YMMV

Re:What does Beta have to do with anything

[Anonymous Coward]

the point he is trying to make is WHY is it opt out rather than opt-in. Companies have to explicitly refuse google stealing there content rather than say yes they can take. This might be fine for one company, what about when there are 10 companies aggregating, or 100 or more. Should a company then have to find every single aggregator and opt out of there service.

nonsense

[idlake]

On the other hand, publishers are not code jockeys (and robots.txt was not in the original spec).

Oh, please, how naive can you be? The NYT web site was created by highly paid, experienced web designers and developers. Of course, they know about robots.txt, and any court would expect a company of that wealth and publishing experience to hire people that know about it.

And even if the NYT employees were so incompetent that they don't know, Google tells them about it [google.com]. Google even gives you a means for removing your site immediately [google.com].

Re:Fair Use

[kponto]

The ironic thing is, if Google had simply "charged for the privelege" of being listed on Google News, as opposed to listing them for free, we probably wouldn't be hearing a peep.

It's all about perception.

Re:The problem with most newspapers

[Forbman]

No, it's not competing with local newspapers. National/world news is commodity information. Winston-Salem NC is not likely to write a story wholely unrelated to NC about McMinnville, OR. So, if I look up anything about "Evergreen Aviation", chances are any news items that show up in GoogleNews are going to be in the Yamhill Observer, Salem Statesman-Journal or Oregonian. Not really competing with them, especially if the best sources for looking at ancillary information to whatever GoogleNews pulled up is from the papers' websites...

It is odd, though, finding interesting Superbowl articles in the Xinhua Times...