Tuesday, September 04, 2007

Google Gains More Power

The Google News site robotically scans hundreds of news sources and provides a faux front page of popular news items, with hundreds, if not thousands, of redundant links to those stories (as they are carried by local news outlets). Google links to these outlets, and this is where the reader then goes to read the story. If the story is from the Associated Press , then the local outlet pays the AP for the content.


Until now.


The AP, among others, saw this as some sort of vague copyright violation. It demanded that Google pay a license fee and link to the story directly from the Google site. So, Google said okay. Now, the newspapers—who collectively "own" the AP—lose a link and a potential long-term customer.


So can someone explain to me why the newspapers would stand by and let this happen? No wonder they're dying. They're run by idiots. The newspapers obviously encouraged the AP and others to do this, or they would have squawked when the idea came up.


The other three organizations that now require Google to take out a license and keep the content on the Google site are Agence France-Presse, the Press Association in the United Kingdom, and the Canadian Press. The argument is that Google is somehow violating their copyrights by running the short summaries, despite the fact that many of these summaries are voluntarily thrown into the public domain by RSS feeds and other mechanisms and should be considered fair use anyway.



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