Something really scary is going on in Germany
martinweigert.com
martinweigert.com
Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.
I suggest the "careful what you wish for" lesson applies both ways. "Justice" implies that Google can and should get away with a lot of things under threat of removing your content from their index.
Google knows that although they could get away with a lot in the short-run, abusing this power would hurt them badly in the long run. They gain huge benefits from being seen as more or less neutral (to the extent possible—some people will never view them that way).
As a result they seem to have been very, very, careful in how they use this power, only wielding it when explicitly ordered to by an authority with power enough to force the issue.
I'm sure the humans at Google are often tempted (who wouldn't be?), but they appear to also be smart enough to resist that temptation...
> AllThingsD reports that Google has now re-indexed newspapers in the Copiepresse group. This is the right move and also a very self-interested one by Google. If it were to “punish” publishers that didn’t want to be included in Google verticals (e.g., News, Places, Shopping) antitrust investigators would use that as evidence against the company.
http://searchengineland.com/beligian-newspapers-claim-retali...
I'd take evil to the next step, where I would now charge the papers for listing search results AND news articles.
Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like: "robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some time back regarding internet filters. But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they link to news articles is almost never mentioned.
One last thing: Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media. There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication wont cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know, but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go.
[1]http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergl...
Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past -- research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals overseas.
What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of abstracts) may also be unfair.
I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good articles would have likely declined.
Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.
Is a discussion necessary? Absolutely. Do we need a strong press? You bet your ass we do. Do we perhaps need to restructure the current model and fund the fourth power? Yeah, I dont know. Is this the way? Certainly not.
But I think this is only another symptom of a trend currently manifestating where people with ties and no insight into the matter try to control and profit from a medium they are just beginning to understand. The ITU conference, this guy in the UK who wanted to sue everyoneone retweeting an article,....
I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there.
If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent.
People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash.
But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?
It' perhaps something to consider, but it has to be a consensual act, where the value is negotiated. Google may already be providing commensurate value by driving traffic to a site.
Again, value is subjective. Even if you think it has zero value, even if every engineer at Google thinks it has zero value, it might have value to someone out there. If nothing else, it could be a part of a corpus linguistics study.
I don't understand the distinction you are making between these two situations.
Think about the larger precedent that you're setting here, however. Should I not be able to quote a few lines and link you to a news story without paying money to the source I'm linking to? (whether the license was compulsory or not). What is google news but a factual stating of "here's what a bunch of sources said about the news today"? If a major event happens in your home town, how much money will it cost you to put up a blog post saying, "here's a roundup of coverage on this event"?
This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".
Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.
By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.
(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)
... I like Clay Shirky's comment:
> Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
and
The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
Full-time investigative journalism cannot go away, for the sake of society. It's a matter of how we will continue it, or what model and best practices will supplant it. iReport doesn't count.
In reality, I agree with Clay (and you, I think), which is to say that it isn't newpapers we might miss, but solid journalism. The interesting question is whether these are indpendent variables. I.e. could we have newspapers without good journalism and good journalism without newspapers.
I think a good case can be made that journalism has been declining for years, irrespective of the effect of the internet.
I also think it's quite possible we may end up with good journalism and no newspapers. I don't think wikileaks is the answer, for example, but such an organisation couldn't exist twenty years ago. I think we'll see a lot more attempts to create a 21st century journalism model before one sticks.
Newspapers and media companies, have had no problem killing off their news departments in the name of profits - eliminating foreign desks, reducing investigative reporting, focusing on lifestyle reportage and opinion pieces.
High quality opinion writers are finding success as bloggers - some are able to make a perfectly good living as such. They don't need the label of a newspaper to sit beneath any more.
There will always be outlets for investigative journalism. There will always be some form of news show and publication. Advertisers gain a certain value from placing their ads alongside high quality news content. Just not enough to support billions of dollars of newspaper revenue.
If the commercial radio and TV stations disappeared from the Bay Area we'd still have NPR - a high quality news alternative. Why? Because there are a certain number of people always prepared to pay something for high quality content.
Long way of saying I think you're right - we'll end up with good journalism and no newspapers.
In case you collect logical fallacies, this is a wonderful example of "Argument from adverse consequences":
A
But A leads to B, and B is bad
Therefore, Not A
This is reasonable if you're deciding whether to pursue A as a course of action, but it is idiotic if you're trying to decide whether A is true or not. A will be true or false regardless of whether you like what it leads to.
In germany we have a couple public tv stations which are financed through a fee everyone owning a tv must pay, regardless if they watch those channels or not. They arent bound to a viewing quota, are independet from the government and have an educational mandate.
Well, at least in theory: In practice huge amounts of money are just wasted by a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, politicians and the church have a saying in the content and the stuff shown is becoming more and more like the crap on private tv stations.
I think something like this could be a viable solutions. But implementing it, especially the algorithm which decides who gets how much is very hard if not impossible. To much attack surface for illegitimate interventions.
edit: typed that comment before I had time to view your link. great read. Never really thought about the "save newspapers vs save journalists vs save society" aspect.
Twitter's coverage of the Arab Spring was better than any Western media in the early days... food for thought.
I would disagree. First of all, my parents dont know how to use twitter. But lets say thats just a generational problem which will solve itself over time. There is still another issue:
The signal to noise ratio on twitter is very low. To get a good information on, lets say the arab spring, I have to spend quite some time digging through many tweets to distill the relevant information. A not dismissible overhead. And even if I managed to find out all relevant tweets and managed to form a coherent image from those splinters of information (which could be hard because I may be missing relevant background information) I still dont know if I based my model on legitimate sources. Regimes knows just as well which power lies in the social media and are eager to spread false information and propaganda.
Of course, false information is a problem also existent with classical journalism, but to a much lesser degree. They build their reputation as a reliable source of information (especially abroad in very intransparent situations like the arab spring) over many years with a network of trusted correspondents.
Thats something which is very difficult to replace with social news mechanisms.
To tackle the problem you describe its important to encourage critical thinking and to not rely on one newssource. And we need investigative journalists. And whistleblower. And social media. And luck.
Its very hard to counter governmental lies on such a big scale.
I wish traditional massmedia fast demise. There's nothing there worth saving at this point.
The other recent example was/is the brain-dead UK/EU cookie law. Is our privacy any more protected? No. All we got was some dumb generic "cookie policy" popups that we have to "agree" to and further balkanization of the web. Additional costs to having a website (are there any scaremongering companies offering auditing to make sure your website does not expose you to legal risk?). Disempowering people by raising the barrier to running a site.
All downside. No upside from any perspective. We can't even blame lobbies or interested parties because literally nobody got anything positive from this. Just pure stupidity.
They should have know better than this.
EU had, and perhaps still has, the promise of a strong political body as a counter-balance to US and Chinese interests in the world. IMHO the promise is rapidly fading though, under what appears to be high-level influence and manipulation that demonstrably favours US-friendly outcomes. This is not a new phenomenon.
Tried to integrate results with Wikipedia, contacted the EFF, forwarded to journalists, nobody will write up the results. Trying reputable university-affiliated Wikinews journalists now. :/
Step 2: Force Google to include you by demanding something like search engine neutrality.
Both Google and newspapers in Germany are glad from such resolution, only some naive young people complain about something. They're surely pirates.
Well, some media (FAZ) did a pretty good job, letting Frank Rieger explain the "Leistungsschutzrecht". OK, even there, it was one article of many. And only one.
And what is new, when it comes to the press not publishing anything, that goes against their own agenda. Even across a lot of publishing-houses. Well nothing new under the sun.
What is really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there might be a reason for this.
Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if these voices are silenced through fear...
... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth, but I just wanted to share the thought.
Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.
Some years before that a friend of mine had written a news search engine, that did exactly the same as Google News, but he did not have the money to fight before court. So he had to remove a lot of publishers from his index.
So I do not think, that linking will become a problem here - but who knows. But the real problem is, that this law might silence independent bloggers. And it was them, who brought important topics into the public discussions, that were ignored by the big publishers, like a planned web-censorship law, that was discussed some years back...
The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.
Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ...").
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele
Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.
On the last big conference for example there was a last minute petition for the further research of time travel. And it has to be discussed. Sure, it was dismissed relatively quickly and it was meant as a joke but those were 30 minutes lost for good.
Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, they are missing likable leading figures (a concept they dont really like). Head of the pirates Bernd Schloemer for example is more of a silent leader. One of the most famous pirates Christoph Lauer comes across as rude, uninterested and smug. A social behaviour 101 wouldnt be that bad for some of the members.
If you don't like state controlled redistribution of wealth you should start a revolution or emigrate.
Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).
A german newspaper will always be more detailed and in-depth when it comes to national matters.
I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that traffic comes from google.
Or would this law mean the state attorney can simply sue Google et al, regardless of the stance of the supposed victim?
Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled.
My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out" group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this scheme was a "good" idea.
As I understand it this is their argument:
Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has advertisements on the page.
Now, as I understand their argument, The publishers claim Google makes money off someone who clicks on an advertisement on these 'constructed' pages. Google's news page is full of headlines and snippets that came from other publications. Google doesn't pay those publications, but the only "reason" that someone is reading the news page in the first place is because those headlines and snippets are on that page. Therefore Google should either share any revenue they got from the ad click with the people whose 'content' was on the page, or they should pre-pay for that content in the first place.
Does that seem like it captures it? If you agree that it does, then we can speculate that the publishers lobbying for this 'law' believe that in this economic transaction Google is getting a better deal than they are.
Except that they conveniently ignore the economic benefit they are getting from Google for telling the world that their web site has interesting content (or at least content related to the news interest or search interest of the web searcher).
Presumably these publishers make income either through sales or advertising on their web site. And those sales are proportional to the traffic at their web site. Google could charge to include them in their search/news results (and they in fact do that in search with AdWords) and would it be more or less than the papers would charge to use a snippet?
The easiest way to educate a publisher on the value of having their results appear in Google is to stop having them appear in Google. Ask any web site that was knocked off the first page by the Panda update how that feels. Those guys really "get" the value they receive by being up there. Publishers don't get that yet. (well not all of them). So Google stops indexing them. Their traffic goes back to pre-1995 levels (which means nobody goes there) and their internet costs (hosting, etc) now exceed the revenue from online advertising. Whoops! Education achieved.
Of course I could be totally off base here, there could be some moral argument I'm missing but frankly I think its all about the money here and not all of the 'value' is accounted for.
(you could get the amount of people clicking through by stopping to list these snippets - the visitors you loose are the visitors that used to click through)
Another thing to add is: Google runs no ads on Google News, so _directly_ they don't make any money using other people's news (indirectly by binding customers etc.)
"Maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy."
Framing it in an adversarial way may confuse the issue. The #1 challenge for any business is getting customers. When ever a business emerges that has a large influence on customer acquisition, it annoys businesses.
Lets re-frame the debate into one from the last century. In the US the telephone company knew the address and phone number of every business in a city by virtue of providing the service. One of the ways they leveraged that is they would publish a book, called the "Yellow Pages" which listed every Company and their number. Because the information was collected into one place, the it gained economic value (information economics being an interest of mine). It had so much "value" to customers that it was the first place they looked for the phone number of a business. Businesses realized that for generic things like plumbing, locksmiths, auto repair, being at the front of the list was better than being at the end of the list. Since the list was lexicographically sorted you started seeming names like AAA Locksmith, and A1 Plumbing. Hacking the name to be at the front. Then the Phone company decided to offer up "ads" where you could place an add on the same page as the listing, now even if your name was Zlotnicks Plumbing you could put an advertisement on the first page where plumbing started. That got you business. The complaint then was "Since everyone uses the Yellow Pages, I am forced to pay high prices to get an ad in their pages just so that people will know I exist."
By that same logic businesses may end up paying search engines to appear (and they do for Shopping links according to Bing's Scroogled.com web site).
And this comment: "I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money."
I can totally agree with that, but I may internalize that differently that you do. I think that giving a search engine a choice "pay us or don't crawl us" they will simply opt not to crawl. But to understand why that makes sense economically you have to think about how the information involved gets its value. In this case a collection of 99 versions of a news story for 'free' is more valuable than 100 versions of the same news story. And its worth is exactly zero for uninteresting stories.
Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that it would make it too costly to experiment and would kill small publishers.
I think the government could make this messy enough to even foil the CC plan. For example they could set it up like GEMA for music - there would be an entity distributing the money and collecting it on behalf of the content providers. Besides, is there a standard way yet to announce CC content? That would be necessary to make it work for search engines.
What the German publishers don't seem to understand is that their once so valuable and scarce goods (information and news) are becoming less and less valuable. Looks like they are trying to defend a dying business model with legislation.
Herbert Simon said in the 70s: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Google is a major dispenser of attention, and I think the German publishers are doing themselves a huge disservice by making it harder for Google to send attention to the publishers.
The big unresolved issue is: how can we finance good journalism in an era where the value of static information approximates zero very quickly? Maybe the answer is in moving away from static information to an information process as the product... Something that can't be copied easily.
Media companies are in the attention harvesting business NOT in the information delivery business. The marginal value of the information product is virtually zero. The marginal value of attention redirected to ads is some rate greater than zero - some rate greater than the cost of delivering that information product. So profit can be made. But the power is in delivering the attention, not the information.
"What’s wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce? No one has to use their headlines if they don’t want to pay for it."
What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example. I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I love quotes.
Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there is such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289
But I suppose I really should have refactored the comment out into a top-level comment and linked to it from both. :)
"Taxing times As newspapers’ woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make Google pay for the news it publishes"
Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the intended consequences :
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...
But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a search.
Something like that. It's not a totally implausible argument. It does seem notable to me that Google is able to extract value from content that the creators can't.
[1]http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf (German)
[EDIT: spelling]
So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with termination fees and call it a wash.
This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all for an even better cause.
German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.
Where are you getting the first part from?
I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay in two ways - direct purchasing, and delivering surplus attention beyond that required to consume the media, which can be redirected towards various forms of advertising. When you cannot run your business on advertising revenue alone it means that not enough people are giving enough surplus attention of enough value to cover.
This argument about the "inherent value" of one form of content or another - of the need to pay artists or creators, or in this case journalists - doesn't extend to other realms. If I decide I want to be a carpenter, I cannot build a table and demand someone buy that table for $1,000. If the market won't bear that price for the table then the government isn't going to force others to pay me $1,000 because I feel that's what it's "worth".
The market rates for all forms of media have plummeted due to there being more supply of attention-draining media than there is demand either in terms of hard-dollars in direct payment, or surplus attention to be redirected towards paid advertising (and its ilk).
When old media companies had a stranglehold on distribution because paper production and distribution was expensive, or video production costs were prohibitive, only a small elite were able to publish their opinions, and the monopolistic distributors were able to charge a premium for the limited access to information or entertainment they provided. They weren't paid well because they provided an outstanding product (though it often was), they were paid well because they limited supply. Those limits are gone. Many many people produce entertainment and informational content. Many do it just for fun and are happy not to get paid. Many more do it with the hope of getting paid anything without the expectation of the lavish salaries and expense accounts of journalists of old.
This undercuts their economics and doesn't even touch on the fact that the newer voices often offer media that is more attractive to younger audiences. Not to mention declining quality of the product in many cases. Many media companies as they've become bloated monstrosities have undermined their own product quality with short-term-profit-focused decision making which had long term harm.
Is it really the case that piracy accounts for all problems in a record industry where the giants spent the pre-Internet-boom '90s crushing independent labels, monopolizing market channels and creating a modern-day payola system on radio where programming was rigidly sliced and diced to the lowest common denominator? Is none of the loss of popularity of the New York Times down to their abandoning their predominantly liberal subscriber audience during the Bush years and being guilty of mis-leading story after mis-leading story in the build up to the Iraq War, destroying people's confidence in their role as a reliable neutral arbiter?
tl;dr The publishers referenced by the OP aren't happy at the market rate for their product and services and want government to rig the market to pay them a cushy wage. Such subsidies rarely save industries in the long term, and the public should be outraged - because legislation of this sort is a public subsidy on a privileged elite in no uncertain terms.
Mediums beget business models, not content. Game Of Thrones has business model closer to X Factor than to Avatar, because similarity of the medium is more important than similarity of the content.
The best way to see this is by looking at the history of porn, the content industry with negative lobbying power. Adult cinemas had the same business model as (and competed with) live shows. Certain types of content got produced. Then home videos changed it entirely. DDifferent types of content got produced for different people. Then DVD + online sales, changed the industry (growing it again). Then live streaming shrunk it.
Each time the medium & distribution changed the whole industry changed. Different producers, different consumers, different content, different size industry, different business model.
Online consumption of news media is not the same as dead tree. That is reality. All of the characteristics of the industry change when that happens. Douglas Adams said it best "It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationa...
In France, for example, there is no such thing as fair use, but that's only because 'fair use' in the US is not defined as what you're allowed to do, however, but as a sort of vague statement about perhaps being able to use things.
In France, it is strictly codified: You are able to make private showings of copyrighted material You are allowed to make private copies (with a few exceptions, e.g. software backups allowed, but copying your poster so you can hang it in two different rooms is illegal, as is copying your software to two different computers so two different people can use it) You can make copies of non-educational works for educational uses (ie. no photocopying textbooks, but you can copy yesterday's newspaper article all you want) Parody Citations Etc.
So taking all the philosophical statements out of the way, what is the econimical case that the newspapers are making? If Google actually showed a bigger part or the whole articles, they'd obviously be taking revenue from newspapers, but it's not the case.
But the key is that the first read, the morning one, involved skimming articles for their gist and reading the ones that interested me. The afternoon session possibly involved reading more, due to boredom.
The real problem the newspapers have is that most of the articles they produce fail the skim test. I don't want to read more. I get the gist. I'm not interested. If they're good I click through and read them on the original site... often then clicking to other things I find there. Win for the Google link to them. If it's a hot topic I'll often read many articles from many pubs on the same topic. But in a world with so many news sources the truth is they don't stand out, I am not going to check a thousand sources very day, or even ten. So I'm not going to wade through to find the things I'm interested in. If they don't want their headings and summaries in Google I don't care about their product.
And I'm a Google user. I pay Google's bills. I don't want them raising my rates in other areas to pay publishers for links to content that I may skim over and never want to read in depth. Why should my costs for Google - in terms of what they can deliver me for all that surplus attention of mine they harvest over a year - go up to subsidize failing newspapers producing product for which the market rate doesn't support their costs?
All it would do is make Google news useless for German news.
Then (in their minds) people will just go to the actual newspaper to see the headlines.
Next time a German native speaker tells me his loves his mother tongue because of the possibility of concatenating words together, I will point them to that hashtag.
The irony is that they are not taking advantage of concatenation, in a language register where it is widely used (twitter), and in a tongue where it is idiomatic (German).
It seems like a scary prospect to think of the ways google, a private company, could start to use its unparralled reach to lobby for legislation in its favor around the entire globe.
Basically RSS with push and access controls. You subscribe to a feed and get pushes / pulls as long as you are paying it. Why isn't there a standard protocol for this on the web?
The law is good because Google can afford to pay and the hordes of blogspammers can't.
Therefore Germany will be the first country without blogspam.
You have a weird definition of 'blogspam' if using a headline to point to an article you're commenting on qualifies as 'blogspam'. There's nothing in the law (from what I've seen) that says "If you have more than a paragraph of text, this doesn't apply to you" or anything similar to that.
1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd.
2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i.e., Google must ask to use their content.
3)If we believe that intellectual property has become an obsolete concept altogether, we should be prepared to accept all of the consequences of this, e.g., a site might pop up using a new TLD that accepts a search query from a client, passes it on to Google using a spoofed IPv6 address, and passes the result back to the client. We also shouldn't care about plagiarism, trademark infringement, etc., because the Internet has clearly made these concepts obsolete and laws related to them unenforceable.
Yes they did, yes they did. The publisher explicitly granted access by putting up the news content in an public subdirectory of a public webserver. News items don't just magically `pop up' in the public subdirectory of a webserver. Usually at least two employees (writer, reviewer) have to log into, and explicitly perform several steps in an CMS to publish a news item.
The decision of publisher is encoded as HTTP server configuration (including CMS, if any). The server obviously provides access only to some resources, as the operator wishes -- the ones meant for public consumption, while other resources are password-protected, only accessible from certain network addresses, or not accessible over HTTP at all.
Just as much as an image resource can be, and often is, protected from deep-linking based on HTTP `Referer' header, a news item can be protected from being indexed by Google News bot and displayed as a snipped in Google News based on `User-Agent' header.
In more details:
A typical User Agent that HTTP GETs some resources from the server describes itself with a `User-Agent' header. Google is honest here, and openly indicates its user agent as a spider bot, with explicit purpose of indexing content for web search.
Even better, Google uses a /separate/ spider bot for Google News service, and it is entirely reasonable to serve the general websearch bot with content -- so the website itself remains indexed -- and deny the news bot access, to prevent Google News from displaying news snippets.
Upon HTTP request, the server reads through request, including resource URL, headers (including User-Agent and Cookies, if any), compares that info to configuration. If, and only if, it matches configuration for unrestricted access, the resource is served. Otherwise, access denied condition is indicated and optionally authentication requested.
Let's assume for a moment the law goes through as requested by the press. The most probable implementation would be, Google includes a particular header in HTTP requests -- indicating itself as a `news-bot-that-has-subscription', and the server would, in turn, compare the header with configuration and either reply with news contents, or perhaps indicate access denied, should subscription expire, or for some other reason. The mechanics is pretty much same as it would be today to restrict Google News bot from gathering, and Google News from displaying (some or all) news snippets.
In short, the publishers have already configured some resources as protected from /some/ User Agents (based on request URL, headers, cookies, network address or anything else), and it is entirely their own choice they serve the news to both Google bots (websearch and news).
I'm failing to see how "read access" and "license to redistribute for profit" are the same thing
Nothing in the HTTP protocol specs (RFC 2616) even suggests it is only meant for direct human consumption. To the contrary, it states,
user agent
The client which initiates a request. These are often browsers,
editors, spiders (web-traversing robots), or other end user tools.
Please don't be obtuse. The whole matter is not about Google doing something strange or different than any other search engine. It's just about collective bargaining of one business group against another business. Some german press companies stood up as a (self-appointed and thus somewhat suspect) representation of whole german press industry and are trying to get a bigger slice of the cake.
Its only raison d'etre is to serve certain guests. We are talking about a commercial server that is managed by a professional admin, and is explicitly open to only some of the public, and it already screens and filters guests, based on various criteria. For example, the server may disallow hotlinking of images, serve some content only upon receipt of a HTTP cookie confirming payment and serve different content for mobile devices, some movies blocked in certain countries, based on IP geolocation. The decision is based on HTTP request data and will of the owner, encoded as server's configuration. Ask yourself, how much different is Google News bot?
How about this analogy instead: ``if I hire a professional bouncer for my high-street shop, and the bouncer stops some people from entering and lets others in, that doesn't mean those let in can indeed walk in''?
Which would be crazy, and press would have a field day with such a shop.
That said, you're absolutely right: how hard can it be to block the Google News bot for a news organization? Not very. My point is merely that you can't draw any legal or moral conclusions from a 200 OK response, that's absurd.
To riff on your example, if my high-street shop has a sign that says "only people over 18" but doesn't have a bouncer, does that mean people under 18 should feel free to enter because nobody's physically stopping them?
The publishers aren't objecting to being indexed. They are objecting because snippets of their articles are being copied, placed on Google News, and used to sell ads without their permission, and they're not being compensated.
1) The debate is centered on Google News. As far as I know, News is one of the few services where Google haven't, don't and won't show ads. "Systematic clipping of one or two sentences [...] for the purpose of providing an ad-free overview and linking to the respective stories" sounds like "fair use" to me.
2) They are publishing their material on the web, for the world to see. If you'd want an opt-in for every crawler out there, no search engine would ever be able to take off and index a significant portion of the web. By the way, an opting out from all (obedient) crawlers is as simple as "Disallow: /"
3) Passing a query on to google through a spoofed IPv6 address doesn't make any sense. Apart from that, there's several services offering just that functionality. Try DuckDuckGo, for example. (I'm not quite sure which search engine they use nowadays, but afaik, the project started out using Google.)
Then Google should have no issue with not linking to publishers who don't want to be linked to. As an aside, I disagree that it's fair use, because it's done systematically as part of a commercial enterprise.
>They are publishing their material on the web, for the world to see. If you'd want an opt-in for every crawler out there, no search engine would ever be able to take off and index a significant portion of the web. By the way, an opting out from all (obedient) crawlers is as simple as "Disallow: /"
If you believe that Google is infringing the publishers' copyrights, then it is not the responsibility of the publishers to opt out. See my response to your first point.
What, they put it on a public directory with semi permanent URLs for no particular reason? That's a pretty flawed argument!
2) as other has said, public sites are indexed in an opt-out system. Opt-in would not work, and would destroy any form of search system, indexing, yellow pages, and so on.
3) This is not an intellectual property issue. Its a term of use issue if one want to be included in google search. One can not say yes to be included in search, but not if there are ads around. Either you want google to give you service, or you don't. I wish I could get a gemail free from spying, a google search thats anonymous, and free telephone calls without any recording/advertizements, but no. I can't get that from google, because their services to have a price tag.
2) I never said that indexing should be opt-in. I said that the use of excerpts should be opt-in.
3) I should think that someone can decline to allow their content to be used to generate ad revenue for someone else.
The crux of the matter is that you're missing the newspapers motive. They don't want Google to ask their permission, they want google to pay them, which is a huge difference. They DON'T want google to ask for their permission and then delist them from Google News if they had to pay for it.
I am on Google's side on this matter, this sounds like extortion. Google should be free to delist them if they want money from their link, in a capitalist society you should be free to chose who you deal with in your business. I live in France, our government wants to tax google to help the newspapers and they didn't take google's answer (that they'd delist the newspapers) well, because they don't want google to respect their IP and ask for permission, they want Google to pay up no matter what.
I haven't missed their motive. Of course they don't want to be delisted from Google News. In a sense, they're like patent trolls, but with more of a moral high ground. Unlike patent trolls, they have produced something and sent it out into the world. It is not their job to preempt what they rightfully view as copyright infringement, even if that infringement might benefit them.
>Google should be free to delist them if they want money from their link
They are.