You’d think newspapers would jump for joy when Google picks up their content and links back their original article, thereby driving mass traffic to their sites. Yet, this Reuters article shows that’s not always the case.
The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to “challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.”
Web sites like Google and its specialized Google News service automatically pull in headlines, photos and short excerpts of articles from thousands of news sources, linking back to the publishers’ own site. Google News does not currently carry advertising.
“They’re building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,” Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview.
“The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article — it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.”
[via Random Culture]
