The first rule of Google Payoff Club is …
One of the Google rumors du jour is that the search sovereign is cutting secret deals with several large UK news organizations to pay them for the privilege of indexing their content in Google News. The story in Scotland’s Sunday Herald is not attributed to named sources, anonymous sources or any discernible sources at all. Google is “understood” to have signed deals that “are reputedly being kept strictly secret for fear that Google will end up having to pay for similar licences with all of the 4500 news services it carries on its news aggregator,” reads the report. “It now seems that Google has accepted it has lost the argument over carrying stories without paying for them.”
To which Google suggests doing a search on the word “hooey.” “Categorically no,” spokesperson Jessica Powell told Search Engine Land. “We don’t pay to index news content.” Another (or perhaps the same) company representative told Ars Technica, “We have not changed our approach to Google News. We believe Google News is legal. We index the content of thousands of news sources online. When users go to Google News, they see only headlines, snippets and image thumbnails from the relevant news articles. If people want to read the story, they must click through links in our results to the original Web site.”
As Ars notes, Google has made deals with the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse for permission to use content in ways that go beyond the fair-use provisions of copyright law, and perhaps the rumored UK deals are along those lines. But given that paying simply for the right to link to news stories would put Google on a dreadfully expensive slippery slope and could doom the practice of linking across the entire Web, skepticism abounds.
would this be the first time a google rep has lied to us? What about their dealings in China as well. Google has turned into a Coprporate liar like the rest of them and has become very good at it. All praise the all mighty dollar, anything for a buck.
This is an area of the law that I’m grappling with on my wife’s blog. My understanding is that, as long as you attribute the source, you’re under no obligation to remove aggregated content until you are requested to do so by the copyright-holder. If I’m correct, that means that small guys like me are protected (because we’re too small to be a threat to big media), but big guys like Google have to show genuine value to the copyright holder. Is this correct? I’m interested in other perspectives, particularly those who have been served for copyright violations.
If you are, like me, a beginner to copyright law on the web, here’s a useful primer: http://www.lawpundit.com/blog/2005/10/copyrights-blogs-news-content.htm
You never know, copyright law in the UK is different to the US. There is no principle of fair use in UK law.
see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing#Fair_dealing_in_the_United_Kingdom