Nobody cares about your huge media publication
Techdirt is, as usual, spot on with the story about the consequences of Google caving in to the pressure of big newspapers in the Google News affair. Although Google News is doing little else besides fetching RSS feeds from various news sources, big media publications claim that they’re somehow stealing from them. Initially Google stood firm on this issue, claiming that what they do is covered by the “fair use” policy, but recently they’ve started paying content providers, and once you go that route, you can’t be selective about it: you have to pay everyone.
The consequences of this dispute are of huge importance for everyone who ever intends to link to anyone else on the web. If the view that links, excerpts, RSS feed aggregation and similar practices that involve the content of others should be paid for prevails, bloggers , smaller media houses, sites like Digg, Reddit, Techmeme - are all screwed. It means that merely linking to someone’s content, together with a short description, can be grounds for a lawsuit.
Words can’t explain how wrong, stupid, and contrary to the idea of the Internet this is. It’s very, very easy to forbid anyone to link to your content, and use your RSS feed: lock your content behind a registration, and don’t have an RSS feed. There, problems solved! But, when it comes to copyright issues, logic takes a deep breath, walks out and takes a day off.
But, I’ve also got some good news. The paper issue which currently gives the bragging rights to newspaper powerhouses will in 5 years become a budget-deflating thorn in their side. Their success will measure in pageviews. And if they don’t have enough of those, they will go out of business. Expecting that they can get money AND pageviews from Google is just ludicrous. Unfortunately, Google seems to be losing on this front, but everyone else will surely avoid linking to someone that can sue them for doing it. I, for sure, will link only to link-friendly publications. Those who can’t understand that linking to them gives them sweet search engine juice, will undoubtedly lose in the end. Therefore, I wholeheartedly agree with the witty subtitle on the Techdirt article:
Just cut them off.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:45 am
I am confused.
It’s ok for google to scour the net for news stories and create their own news portal from other people’s content but their own Terms of Service forbids anyone from doing the same with their aggregated news. Google can use a robot to monitor and copy anyone else’s content but we can’t monitor or copy or create a derivative work from their derivative work ?!
“2. Use of the Service. You may only display the content of the Service for your own personal use (i.e., non-commercial use) and may not otherwise copy, reproduce, alter, modify, create derivative works, or publicly display any content. For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service.”
May 21st, 2007 at 7:15 am
@ok: to be honest, in the above article I didn’t go into Google’s side of the story. But I do know that Google News is also non-commercial: i.e., they don’t run ads on it.
Good observation, though.
May 21st, 2007 at 2:50 pm
[…] You have to be open to finding new ways to maintain and monetize your value statement. Or just be patient enough for Google to figure it out for you. Tags: newspapers […]
May 21st, 2007 at 7:51 pm
I think you could argue that everything Google does is commercial since everything they develop is intricately connected and aimed at increasing traffic to their web properties that run ads. Google also tried to claim non commercial use in the Library project where they scanned books but didn’t run ads beside copyrighted material. But the copyrighted material drives traffic and use of the site and eventually spills over into ad revenue for them. The irony is that Google’s TOS explicitly forbids this exact type of of use stating that you may not use the service “to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales;”.
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