Should Google Be Forced To Pay For News? 322
Barence writes "The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore new models that 'require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and "at the edges" in the world of search and aggregation.'"
RSS feed (Score:5, Informative)
The funny thing is that I've had the Guardian on my RSS feed for a while, mainly because their RSS feed contains the whole article, so I don't even need to click the link unless I want to see pictures.
My feed reader might be "stealing" from them, but they seem to be encouraging it.
Re:Shooting self in foot (Score:5, Informative)
Correct response (Score:3, Informative)
"So, you're saying that people can't tell anybody else what articles your paper has today?"
That sums it up succinctly. Google doesn't (aside from it's cache) serve up the article. All it does is state what articles are available and where they can be found. Exactly what someone saying "Hey, the Guardian had this article yesterday on page 17, you gotta read it." is doing.
Alternatively, Google should simply stop spidering the objecting sites. End of problem. Well, for Google anyway. The lack of traffic may cause a problem for those sites, but that's what they asked for.
They do pay... (Score:5, Informative)
I work for the news wire AFP, and we have an agreement with Google to use our news.. and they DO pay us... http://searchengineland.com/afp-google-settle-over-google-news-copyright-case-10926 [searchengineland.com]
Re:Not us. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I had to REQUEST being added as a Google News source. A little while later we were reviewed and they determined that we were a news source and not just a link spammer, and voila, we were listed.
Being added [google.com] and/or removed [google.com] isn't a big deal. The link is at the bottom of the main Google News page.
The first time we were listed on the front page (at the top of the page at that), we were killed. Slashdotted to an extreme, if you will. A bit of improving, and now we don't notice when we're shown on the main page. Sometimes we're on the direct news.google.com page. Sometimes we're on a section, or a national page.
Stories that are linked from the main page frequently get us higher traffic, but not always. Well, there will always be more hits, but it may not outrank other stories that we've historically run. In any case, any publisher that has advertising, that counts their views and clicks (like, ummm, anyone with a clue should be doing for years now), their income will increase from being linked, IF they have a quality story.
I think they want to charge, because there's pretty serious competition. Just because my story is linked directly from the main page doesn't mean that it'll be there in an hour or tomorrow. It can (and frequently does) rotate the links to the more current story. So, I ran my story at noon. You ran yours at 2pm with updates, yours is more relevant.
Re:Not us. (Score:4, Informative)
It kind of makes me wonder if there were groups of professional copiers who were pissed off 500 years ago when Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe.
I don't know about that invention, but the invention of music notation [lewrockwell.com] pissed off the existing music-teaching cartel and resulted in retribution against its inventor!
Re:Not us. (Score:3, Informative)
>>>I think it has to just "kill" those in charge that they got in late on the party, and cannot better control this medium and regulate it into uselessness for the masses.
I'm glad. I remember the pre-web days when folks like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, et cetera dominated the national computer communications. They produced little content and charged ridiculous rates (5 cents per email; $1 an hour) to access it. These services were also heavily censored by their parent corporations. Today's free-form internet where the website is privately-held but the actual net is uncontrollable is much better.
Re:The issue explained (Score:1, Informative)
I'm worried about the future of investigative journalism, and I've got to think that for every investigative journalist that huffpo hires, 10 are laid off from the rocky mountain news
Have you really looked at a newspaper lately? I checked out the RM News site on occasion, and there hasn't been any real investigative journalism beyond local stories and some "human interest" (aka touchy-feely stories about puppies) stories in years.
Investigative journalism started dying before the internet came along, and the final nail in the coffin was the advent of the cable news networks. This issue is just throwing a little extra dirt on top of the grave.
Re:Not us. (Score:3, Informative)
Eventually the two reached a settlement whereby G didn't show their cached results [earthtimes.org]
a history of the case [searchengineland.com]
Re:Not us. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not us. (Score:5, Informative)
The parent is correct. While the Pope may have bought into printing for his own purposes, the Church objected mightily to the translations that were printed in the common language. William Tynedale was even executed for his work in translating the Bible into English.