The anti-MSM reaction on the net to the Belgian court ruling against Google News has been predictably hysterical and boils down to a few completely mistaken points:
- Google is a search engine. Google has become a publisher, and Google's activities as a publisher are the ones that are at issue here. Google's search system was not the issue in the Belgian ruling.
- Newspaper publishers are stupid and don't understand basics of the Internet like robots.txt. Nonsense. Everybody knows about robots.txt and about its shortcomings. The so-called robot exclusion standard (theoretically) forbids spiders from visiting pages. It can't encode licensing terms for spidered content. This is why the World Association of Newspapers is proposing a richer alternative called Automated Content Access Protocol.
- Google is sending valuable traffic to publishers, and squaring off against Google is self-destructive. This is not relevant to the question of whether Google's repurposing practices amount to fair use or thievery. But it also isn't automatically true. Publishers benefit from some sorts of Google listings and not from others. Many publishers have a business model predicated entirely on service to a geographically focused community and derive little benefit (and often great expense) from Google-driven traffic. And, of course, publishers suffer when the new summary pages of Google News take away the audience that otherwise would have gone to the publishers' content on their own sites.
- Google is good and MSM is evil. If you think that, you probably haven't read any of Google's one-sided terms-of-service documents or examined Google's collaboration with censors. Google snatches content at will and republishes it, but has this to say about your reuse: "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." Maybe we should just cut-and-paste that into our TOS documents.
I can't read Flemish, so I don't know what the order published on the front of Google Belgium says, but I can read the English-language summary (PDF) published at ChillingEffects.org.
It contains these words:
"Considering that the expert Mr. GOLVERS, who had as particular assignment to describe how press articles are presented and the interactivity between the visitor and the web site of Google News, concludes that 'Google News must be considered to be an information portal and not a search engine'; ...
"... as soon as the article can no longer be seen on the site of the Belgian newspaper publisher, it is possible to obtain the contents via the 'Cached' hyperlink which then goes back to the contents of the article that Google has registered in the 'cached' memory of the gigantic data base which Google keeps within its enormous number of servers; ..."
I'm not eager to see lawsuits against search engines as a primary tool for resolving this issue, but it seems to me that the Belgian ruling is well grounded in the reality of today's Internet. There is a line between fair use and thievery, and it is not Google's to define through unilateral action.
(Disclosure: I run Google ads on my site. Once in a very long while they send me a check for $100, which my wife forgets to cash.)
Comments
Misstatement?
You wrote: "I'm eager to see lawsuits against search engines as a primary tool for resolving this issue, but it seems to me that the Belgian ruling is well grounded in the reality of today's Internet."
Is that right? Did you mean to type "I'm *not* eager..."? That would seem to make more sense, as I can't imagine anyone (other than a lawyer) is *eager* to see lawsuits multiply.
thanks for the clarification.
How is Google News Violating Copyright?
Hi, Steve
Thanks for writing this. I've been covering this issue over on Poynter's E-media Tidbits.
See: Is Google News a Threat? How?
What I don't get is how Google News can possibly be construed as copyright infringement. Looks to me that they just display headlines and brief excerpts, with links back to the original content. They aren't displaying full or even near-full text. Looks like fair use to me -- no more infringement than, say, a citation in a bibliography.
I can understand online publishers (not just newspapers) getting riled over Google's practice of making its cached pages publicly accessible. But that's another matter.
The larger issue is that I don't understand why news organizations would view Google News as a threat rather than a partner. That just makes no business sense, as far as I'm concerned. But I know a lot of smart people do see GN as a threat to news orgs. I was wondering if maybe you could explain that perspective.
Thanks,
- Amy Gahran
How is Google News Violating Copyright?
Hi, Steve
Thanks for writing this. I've been covering this issue over on Poynter's E-media Tidbits.
See: Is Google News a Threat? How?
What I don't get is how Google News can possibly be construed as copyright infringement. Looks to me that they just display headlines and brief excerpts, with links back to the original content. They aren't displaying full or even near-full text. Looks like fair use to me -- no more infringement than, say, a citation in a bibliography.
I can understand online publishers (not just newspapers) getting riled over Google's practice of making its cached pages publicly accessible. But that's another matter.
The larger issue is that I don't understand why news organizations would view Google News as a threat rather than a partner. That just makes no business sense, as far as I'm concerned. But I know a lot of smart people do see GN as a threat to news orgs. I was wondering if maybe you could explain that perspective.
Thanks,
- Amy Gahran
Google News and Europe
Steve,
Thanks for your posting. One dimension you could mention in the Google News issue would be a new dispute between America and Europe. You already have a lot of examples: remember the Microsoft case and the rules defined by the European commission, remember the immediate reaction of European public libraries when Google wanted to scan and offer old or classical books for free.
Maybe it was not said so clearly but there is always this idea that Europeans cannot accept a one-way American point of view or business model. For instance, the Google choice of books offered to the public would be very different from the French "Bibliothèque Nationale". Not the same historical background, not the same values, not the same references... But thanks to Google, the search was a catalyst and now European libraries work together!
Same thing for Google News: the copyright laws are not the same - journalists are paid when there is a re-print - and it requires some discussion. Impossible to say "internet is a new world and we forget two centuries of copyright struggle since Beaumarchais!
But in fact, the real debate is financial. For the first time last week I saw a newspaper giving figures about the role of Google in its traffic: French daily Le Monde said that 10% of its online readers came through Google (including Google News). It means - if the figures are correct - that 10% of the online advertising revenues are brought by Google. 10% is not a so big figure that newspapers website cannot survive and thrive without Google...
Google News and Google Alerts are really fantastic and I am quite confident that - after the beta period -, Google and the news providers will find a solution for sharing revenues. Just imagine that, when advertising will exist on Google News, there will be no technical problem for sharing revenues (in cash or through barter agreements). The compromise is not so far that we expect.
Last point: the European row against Google News is linked to the announce that there will be a European challenger: Quaero (not the definitive name of the service). Through the Exalead search engine, Thomson and Bertelsmann are trying to set up a new "Airbus success story": thirty years ago, there was just Boeing and now Airbus and Boeing are at the same level.
Just to say that there is a sort of American oligopole regarding search engines and it will be challenged with new competitors. And also new business models: Quaero would be sold to publishers and it would be to the publishers to find advertising. A totally different business model than Google that is a destination by itself.
www.editorsweblog.org
Google Threat
I'm not sure Google news is a threat -- I'm pretty sure it's not -- but it is true that most of the traffic it sends to a site is undifferentiated, bandwidth-sucking, drive-by and worthless page views.
A big question is, is the small amount of traffic that could conceivably converted into loyal readers who find your site through Google news worth the rest of it?
I don't know the answer yet.
It could be more useful, better designed, to help local news searches, which would be more helpful to both readers and publishers. It would be very cool if on commodity news, it served relevant links by zip code so that the closest site serving the 100th AP story on the Pope's birthday is served to somebody who might actually be persuaded to look at some local news, too.
None of this makes sense
There are several things Copiepresse's members could have done to avoid display of premium content to non-subscribers:
(a) use robots.txt and meta tags
(b) Show the first few (up to 100) words of the article and invite readers to log in or subscribe. Hundreds of newpapers and magazines do this.
(c) A more sophisticated version of this is to publish items freely for a while then require log in / subscription. A lot of newspapers do this, and have no difficulty in preventing Google from caching pages.
Methods (b) and (c) in effect use the search engines as an advertising medium. This is much cheaper than most other advertising techniques, and and more effective because the hits on their sites come from people who are interested in the stories and are therefore more likely to subscribe than people who see and mostly ignore ads in other media.
So why on earth did Copiepresse's members not use some of these techniques?
Google said "they only needed to ask" to have their content removed. It would be informative if both Copiepresse and Google published the relevant correspondence so we can see what attempts were made to resolve the issue before Copiepresse sued Google.
As it is I think Copiepresse have just shot themselves in the foot - and may have harmed other web sites in Belgium. It's unlikely that Google will approach a lot of Belgian web sites to ask permission - not just because of cost but because the lack of human intervention is a key part of Google's idea of objectivity. So it's quite possible that Google will make its default policy "don't index Belgian content" and Belgian web sites will have to take special measures to get content indexed, e.g. by including some Google-specific HTML in their pages.