In an act of stunning shortsightedness, a consortium of 19 Belgian newspapers has sued and won a case against Google for copyright infringement in its News Search engine. Google must now remove all links, images and cached pages of these sites from its database or else face fines. Similar lawsuits from other European papers are likely to follow soon.
The main beef in the case (all explained in greater detail here) is Google’s practice of deep linking to specific articles, which bypasses ads on the newspapers’ home pages and reduces revenue. This and Google’s caching of full articles for search purposes, copies that the newspapers contend could be monetized through a pay-for-retrieval service. Echoes of the Book Search lawsuits on this side of the Atlantic…
What the Belgians are in fact doing is rendering their papers invisible to a potentially global audience. Instead of lashing out against what is essentially a free advertising service, why not rethink your own ad structure to account for the fact that more and more readers today are coming through search engines and not your front page? While you’re at it, rethink the whole idea of a front page. Or better yet, join forces with other newspapers, form your own federated search service and beat Google at its own game.
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A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
As usual, it’s all to do with money. Ars Technica have a very good writeup about it. The long and the short of it is that these papers could have used the robots.txt file to stop Google, but instead it’s a lot more lucrative to demand a share in Google’s advertising revenue.
Ars Technica also point out that the move could be very, very bad for internet users and search engines since the European Commission are looking at this case with the possible intention of changing copyright law to reflect the ruling.
without going into the merits of the legal case, i’m not sure what’s wrong with copyright holders wanting google to share some of its ad revenues when people use google to access copyrighted work.
Search indexing has traditionally operated in a copyright gray zone. Everyone who owns a web page theoretically could demand that Google share ad revenues generated off the listing of their pages in search results, but then Google would, as the Ars Technica piece puts it, “end up owing everyone who has ever published something online a cut of the pie.” Imagine the microfinance infrastructure that would have to be put in place! It would likely make search engines totally impractical.
Generally speaking, Web publishers of all sizes and stripes are happy to let Google index and cache their pages w/out permission and w/out a share of the ad revenues since w/out search they would be lost. It’s not that copyright doesn’t apply to the Web, it’s just that the common practice has been to ignore it. Common practice offline is to get permission for every move you make, and that’s what Copiepresse (the Belgian news group) is bringing to bear in this case.
It’s worth noting that Google does make an exception to the online practice of copying and caching without permission and not sharing ad profits in the case of its Book Search Publishers Program. In that context, publishers’ works are indexed only if they’ve explicitly submitted them for inclusion, and unlike News Search, ad revenues are shared. Based on that, you could argue that newspapers are justified in demanding a similar arrangement. But the definition of a news site (is it a newspaper? a magazine? a blog? an aggregator? a filter?) has become so blurred that you would necessarily be talking about a huge slice of the Web. Again, Web search would become prohibitively difficult to operate. Where do you draw the line?
It does seem that copyright disputes come down to perceptions and cultural notions as much as to fine points of law. Even with the expansion of the Web into all zones of culture, people still generally take a book to be an offline media form. Consequently, the publishers are getting more deferential treatment (the huge library controversy notwithstanding). It’s like a transit toll from the old media to the new. Newspapers on the other hand have been cross-breeding with the digital for well over a decade, so people think of them as more net-native and are less sympathetic with their gripes over copyright infringement (the Belgian court’s ruling notwithstanding).
next thing you know,
the wind will want to
charge the weatherman
for telling everybody
which way it blows…
-bowerbird