Newspapers Want Pay from Google, Other News Aggregators for Excerpts
Though it’s “way too premature to talk about any legal issues,” an international newspaper lobby has in its sights news aggregators such as Google News for excerpting online articles without paying, a spokesman told us. The Paris- based World Assn. of Newspapers (WAN) convened a task force of international and European publishers, editors and other executives to devise standards for its members to press aggregators for compensation. Google News and others typically carry a headline and one or 2 lines of text from an online article, and sometimes a photo from that article or separate news service. Such practices are “using newspapers’ own stories to compete with them,” the WAN spokesman said.
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Meanwhile, the industry eagerly awaits the outcome of Agence France-Presse’s (AFP) lawsuit against Google filed in 2005 for copying its photos, headlines and text in Google News. The parties recently agreed to test AFP’s claims that Google went beyond fair use, by having Google provide samples of its Google News homepage 2003-2005 to match against AFP’s English and French-language and photo databases. The outcome of the case is expected to provide guidance on aggregators’ obligations to source websites, the WAN spokesman said.
The task force is taking its concerns to govt. officials. For now it seeks a meeting with Charlie McCreevy, European Union comr.-Internal Market & Services, and Viviane Reding, comr.-Information Society & Media. Though no meetings have been discussed with U.S. or Asian govt. officials -- most task force participants are from Europe -- “I wouldn’t count that out,” the spokesman said.
WAN’s national members, like the Newspaper Assn. of America, have pressed their case with aggregators from the start. They have had some success with Yahoo, which largely pays for content it carries. But most don’t. “We're trying to provide an industry overview to let newspapers know what the options are,” and to avoid legal action if possible, the spokesman said.
WAN calls aggregators’ practices “the Napsterization of content,” drawing a parallel with unauthorized file-sharing that the music industry says has hurt its sales. “There’s definitely some benefit to newspapers from search engines linking to stories and [users] clicking through,” but “it isn’t enough value” to compensate for the revenue mainstream news sites are losing because some users will be satisfied with the aggregators’ synopsis, the spokesman said.
The industry doesn’t have hard figures or formal estimates of any losses caused by aggregators. “I don’t think any studies have been done on that,” although “certainly there’s anecdotal evidence that… [readers] just go to the [aggregators'] site to get the headlines” and don’t click through to the source, the spokesman said. He pointed to an internal NYTimes.com study that found most visitors to the site from aggregators “didn’t go anywhere” after landing on the linked page from the aggregator, meaning the site can’t claim additional ad views from linked articles.
“It’s the potential we're looking at right now” for aggregators to harm source sites, either by selling advertisements on the aggregation page or reducing traffic to those sites, the spokesman said. Google will inevitably sell ads on its news subdomain, and “they don’t have a very good track record when it comes to media approaching them for compensation.” Though Yahoo has formal deals with many outlets -- almost 100 by the spokesman’s estimate -- it links and excerpts content informally as well, he added. Yahoo, however, typically carries full stories from wire, magazine and newspaper partners, in contrast with Google News, which provides headlines, short excerpts and photos, with links to the source sites. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft -- which also aggregates content through MSN -- couldn’t be reached for comment.
Google Agrees to Random Sample of News Homepage for AFP
The case that could shape WAN’s strategy against aggregators took a turn last month. In AFP v. Google, the French wire service said Google News was displaying its “photographs, headlines and story leads” and committing infringement, since those materials are intended for its paid subscribers, not the public. The parties agreed in court documents Jan. 23 to a test of AFP’s claims, though it wouldn’t determine liability.
Google and AFP said they would jointly choose 14 random dates Aug. 1, 2003-July 31, 2004, and Oct. 1, 2004-March 1, 2005, to use as a sample of Google News’s homepage. Google has until March 31 to provide the contents of the English and French pages “as each existed each hour, on the hour” to AFP, which will check the hourly screen grabs for content matching that in its English, French and photo databases. The content on Google News changes throughout the day, as often as every few minutes, based on its news algorithms. AFP can request more samples if fewer than 25 photographs and 25 story leads or headlines are found in the samples.
But the samples are explicitly barred from use to determine Google’s liability, if any, the joint filing said. The samples will not be considered to “provide a fair or accurate sample for purposes of monetary liability,” and Google said the company “cannot be required to incur the serious burden and expense of reconstructing past Google News pages” other than that agreed in the filing. Its purpose in agreeing to provide samples was “voluntarily minimizing disputes” and putting the burden on AFP to identify which materials Google News infringed, which it hasn’t done. The final date for discovery is Oct. 15.