Papers Want Piece of Search Engine Pie
|
Written By Reprise Media | February 1, 2006 | Share This
|
|
Even though Google took a bit of a dive yesterday after missing their Q4 earnings estimate (see the Internet Stock Blog for continuing analysis), they still netted upwards of $370 million. And a league of newspaper publishers believe some of that swag is rightfully theirs.
This Cnet story says that the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which represents 18,000 publications, is hopping mad at Google, Yahoo! and other search engines for the way they aggregate the news content created by journalists: they specifically refer to the common practice of lifting the headlines and leads of published stories, placing them next to a thumbnail photo and linking back to the paper’s website. They charge that search engines neither seek permission for using the blurbs nor offer compensation to newspapers, and state, “it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.”
At least in the US, WAN doesn’t seem likely to proceed much farther than strong language and fist shaking. Ryan Paul at Ars Technica notes that “the use of image thumbnails has been protected as fair use” domestically. As long as search engines’ news pages remain ad free, it could protect them from suits such as those brought by Agence France Presse against Google last March, as well as future action by WAN. And if newspapers are insecure enough to think that readers only require the first three lines of their stories, they might try giving us more incentive to read all the way to the end.
WAN president Gavin O’Reilly says, “The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense.” But Ryan Paul says the irony in that statement might be that the search engines drive so much traffic to news sites - after all, page views equal revenue in online publishing. Paidcontent’s Rafat calls this story a “PR nightmare” for traditional media, and Susan Mernit thinks WAN’s tough words are “mostly grandstanding.” We’ll let WAN have the last word:
“We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they’re building [their business] on the back of kleptomania.”
Not that they’re overstating their case or anything, but it sounds like WAN is trying to have it both ways.
Topics: Legal Issues |