One old-media journalist thinks it’s time to unleash a brigade of Louis Vuitton-bearing lawyers on Google to stop them from stealing from newspapers.
As Mike Masnick suggested on Techdirt, a lawsuit “would get laughed out of court pretty damn fast.”
Movie critic Roger Moore (not the James Bond actor) made the nuclear class-action option his cause celebre in a letter that appeared on Poynteronline:
Why have we yet to hear the phrase “class action lawsuit” in this discussion? It seems to me that while the big media companies might be reluctant to go after some of Google’s billions, no newspaper or news institution (“big Media”) would be facing this sort of Wall St. pressure if investors knew that Google and Yahoo, et al, were going to have to part with a big portion of their billions each year in paying copyright fees, click-charges, or whatever you want to call it, to those same companies Wall Street has written off as a doomed industry.
That last sentence of his contained 86 words, and not one idea of what it is Google News does. He’s in good company, as such cluelessness can be found in the offices of places like AFP or Copiepresse.
Google News indexes content from news sites. Algorithms put together similar stories, and when interest in that topic rises, the topic appears on the front of Google News. Some of the opening words of the story appear alongside their headlines; they total about 20 to 25 words.
To read the rest of the article, one has to click the link and visit the site hosting the story. There are no ads on Google News, so Google isn’t making money off its news pages. If it were, then Moore’s position likely has more weight.
It doesn’t, and considering how smart we writers like to think we are, it’s amazing that some in a profession as money-obsessed as ours (oh yes, dear reader, we love our work, and we love to be paid for our work) can’t follow the money in search when it comes to news and Google.
It isn’t Wall Street writing off the news, as Moore hinted. It’s the readership, a time-compressed body of people who have to work longer hours to even approach the quality of life the baby boomers enjoyed. We simply do not have the time to flip pages, nor the inclination.
The reasons for that go beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here. If a newspaper doesn’t want to be in Google News, the employment of a simple robots.txt file will keep the Googlebot off of its pages. It’s that simple.
If you think someone is coming in your house and taking your stuff, try locking the door first.
