Google CEO Warns Newspapers Not To Anger Readers 328
Barence writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hit back at newspaper bosses, warning them that they risk alienating readers in their war against news aggregators such as Google News. 'I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants,' Schmidt said at a conference for the Newspaper Association of America. 'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.' Schmidt's rebuke follows a sustained attack on Google by newspaper bosses such as Rupert Murdoch, who have accused the search giant of 'stealing' their content without payment."
Schmidt also suggested that newspapers need to expand their distribution methods to make better use of mobile technology, and a NY Times piece argues that the Associated Press' struggle against aggregators is futile since they're largely trying to give news stories to consumers for free anyway.
I use google news (Score:5, Interesting)
I use it because I can set up email alerts that let me scan a multitude of newspapers for certain keywords related to my business. The newspaper conglomerates themselves COULD have gotten together and put together a similar service, but they DIDN'T. Now google news is the only service that offers this. It's not google's fault that they have dragged their heals and clung desperately to the old model of doing things for so long.
I'll say to them what I would say to the movie and music industry: Adapt to the new way of doing things or don't complain when you suffer for your stubbornness.
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:3, Interesting)
And remember folks, he is Google's lawyer
Fixed.
Sure he's a lawyer, and so we can assume he's qualified to talk about the law. But as Google's lawyer, it's his job to present a view of the law that agrees with Google. It doesn't mean he's right or wrong; but I wouldn't just take his word as gospel.
IANAL, though I've studied copyright a few times in my life and am certainly an opinionated layman. I generally like what he has to say, but fair use is a risky place to play. The law gives some guidance on what it is, but it's wide open to interpretation (and if you want anything more codified you have to dig through hundreds of pages of industry recommendations and case law, assuming those cover situations like the one you're interested in... and don't think industry recommendations are unbiased).
If I were on a jury deciding whether fair use applied, I suspect my reasoning would boil down to this: in a given use case, does Google allow me to read the substance of the article without seeing ads or doing whatever else the owner would normally have me do to generate revenue for them?
And I suspect that comes down in pretty good agreement with what Google's lawyer is saying; but I always do worry when people throw non-sequiturs into their copyright arguments, like "I'm really helping the copyright owner"... maybe; so what?
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:3, Interesting)
That goes to one of the four factors of the fair use test -- the effect upon the work's value in the marketplace. So it's actually not irrelevant. If my use of your work makes your work MORE valuable to you rather than less, that's a good argument that my use is fair (assuming enough of the other factors are satisfied).
Re:This Just In... (Score:5, Interesting)
but jeezuz, how hard is it to grasp the fact that a large number of the eyeballs viewing your "news" arrive at your web site via a link on Google news?
The president of the internet division of the newspaper conglomerate I work for actually said this in response to a manager suggesting working more closely with Google to improve SEO: "We don't want users to search for our site. We need to focus on the users who are on our site and make it easier for them to find the content they want via our internal search." Yeah. We don't want silly new readers. And we don't want readers to be able to find us on search engines. They should just know to come here and when they're here, they'll then learn how to use a search engine - our search engine. I bet our search algorithms are totally better than google's.
Re:Yeah this reader's _____ (Score:4, Interesting)
Then the idiot delivery woman keeps throwing papers in the middle of the street, where they get squashed by passing cars (or disappear completely).
Remember paperboys? Sigh. I'm old enough that I can claim to have been one of the last of that breed.
From what I heard, they phased them out in the years after I stopped doing it (late 80s, early 90s) because kids just weren't reliable about managing themselves. It wasn't that complicated, but it did require commitment to doing the same thing at the same time(s) every day.
The pay was peanuts, but it felt good at 11 to have some income on my own other than my allowance. And having an endless supply of rubber bands meant that I became a deadly shot with them (against assorted flying insects, anyhow).
Sigh... zzzwha? Gerroff mah lawn you damn kids!
Re:Yeah this reader's _____ (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing to remember about the newspaper business: The home delivery subscriber is *not* the customer. The advertiser is. Find a misprint in a graphic ad with color that you've placed and you'll get an entirely different type of response.
Re:Dirty Schmidt (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd go with a quote from "The Dark Knight" instead:
They're Both Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a small-town newspaper editor. I'm feeling the pain, though not nearly as bad as most papers are. We're independent, so we actually have to run as a business and not as an overleveraged financial con game, the way so many large news chains are these days. This turns out to mean that we weather the storm far better than the big guys.
The Associated Press' recent saber-rattling in Google's direction is, I believe, nothing more than some moguls' desperate attempt to wring some cash out of some successful Internet companies on their way out the door. The fact is that there was always a five-minute remedy to the supposed wrongs done to them -- robots.txt -- will probably devastate their case. But who knows? Maybe they figure they can get some go-away money. The legal system doesn't always go the way you might expect it to.
That said, Schmidt's idea that newspapers should live in fear of "pissing off" readers is fatuous and lame, and exactly wrong. Sure, this should be the case when it comes to usability -- by all means, get the info in front of eyeballs any way you can, and with the absolute minimum amount of pain on the user's end. That should be everyone's goal.
But then there's content, and here it is absolutely essential to risk pissing off your readers with every issue. The news people need to hear -- the news that it's important for them to hear -- is bad news. The fact that you print bad news is going to inevitably piss people off. Maybe a lot of people. You want news that pisses no one off? You're asking for a Chamber of Commerce newsletter, not a newspaper. And look how well read those are.
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:2, Interesting)
I disagree. How often do the majority of people still read big-brand, traditional news sources? And that will drop further if they opt out of aggregating services. I check my local daily briefly, but get the majority of my news from other sources.
Fred Wilson makes the point here:
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/you-cant-take-the-paper-out-of-the-newstand.html [avc.com]
Newspapers dropped the ball on classifieds and this is only going to be another example of management making another dreadful mistake.
Quit the jibberjabber and opt out, I say. If major papers don't want to participate, opt out and leave it for those publishers and readers who do.
They want their cake and eat it (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly it isn't option 1). I'm sure their server logs tell them what percentage of their traffic comes from Google. They want their cake and eat it: ie to be paid by Google for the privilege of sending traffic their way.
Re:No. The Internet is creating madness. (Score:2, Interesting)
There is a wee bit of truth there.
News content has declined steadily over the last 20 years.
But really - that's just the product keeping pace with the consumer.
Look at the devolution of the typical slash dotter.
When I first started following /. I was impressed by the breadth and depth of knowledge possessed by it's readership.
Now - I'm underwhelmed.
Literacy and education have been severely devalued in the US.
Make the claim that people who have invested their resources in education and personal development are inherently more valuable to society, and you'll be immediately attack as an Elitest - as if that's a pejorative.
News reporters (the actual reporters - not the talking heads) have essentially stopped investigative journalism entirely, and what's worse is that no one calls them on it.
My local paper, The Oregonian, published a slew of articles railing against a local "meth epidemic."
It has since been pointed out that Steve Suo, the hack responsible for most of the content, simply made up those statistics that didn't come straight from a local cop, who in turn freely admits he made up what he told the reporter.
Was there a hue and cry against such an obvious attempt to influence public policy and opinion through yellow journalism?
Nope.
But a lot of us have come to realize that the newspapers can't be trusted as far as you can throw them.
No, it's not an Evil World Dominating Conspiracy - it's just laziness, incompetence, and greed.
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:3, Interesting)
As I see it, the intent ot the "impact on value" criteria has to do with whether there's negative impact (...)
Saying that positive impact is an argument for fair use (any more than 'no impact') implies that I can ignore your rights as long as its for your own good
Actually "not negative" is the same as "equals, or is greater than, zero". So if I say that it's positive, I'm stating I fulfil a qualified version of the requirement.
Plus, the OP said, "If my use of your work makes your work MORE valuable to you rather than less, that's a good argument that my use is fair (assuming enough of the other factors are satisfied).".