Daily Telegraph rattles legal sabre at Google

Battle of Belgium bound for Blighty?

By Christopher Williams, 24th April 2007

The editor of The Daily Telegraph has hinted that the paper could be on a legal collision course with Google and Yahoo! over the aggregators' use of its content.

Newspaper industry watcher Roy Greenslade reports that speaking at the Ifra newsroom conference in Paris last week, Telegraph editor Will Lewis said:

Our ability to protect content is under consistent attack from those such as Google and Yahoo! who wish to access it for free. These companies are seeking to build a business model on the back of our own investment without recognition. All media companies need to be on guard for this. Success in the digital age, as we have seen in our own company, is going to require massive investment...[this needs] effective legal protection for our content, in such a way that allows us to invest for the future.

Media owners are becoming increasingly bold in their attacks on aggregators, and particularly Google, which they accuse of bagging huge advertising revenues on the back of zero investment in content. Last week it reported first quarter revenues of $3.6bn, way ahead of expectations.

Angered by YouTube, execs at entertainment giant Viacom are engaged in a $1bn war of words with Mountain View, and Belgian newspaper group Copiepress scored a humiliating victory, forcing the removal of content from Google News.

Google fought that case to the bitter end, and chose to submit itself to a revenue carve-up in a similar dispute with French news agency AFP, rather than face court in the US. A high profile UK court challenge would presumably be similarly distasteful to Google's doyens, who prefer the image of plucky young web success the company maintains in the mainstream.

Google has said that republishing snippets of news reports via Google News is fair use, and that if owners ask it will deindex them. Opponents argue that Google has a de facto monopoly on search, and so controls the gateway to internet news, and should therefore be compelled to share the huge profits it draws for relatively little effort. ®

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Posted Wednesday 25th April 2007 08:31 GMT

Anonymous Coward

What is "fair use"?

I stopped buying The Times because I realised that I may as well read it online at no cost.

Is that "fair use"?

Posted Wednesday 25th April 2007 00:30 GMT

Anonymous Coward

how about using google fairly

hmmm, didn't "fair use" had to pass some tests. like, not being used for profit, being used for criticism and parody and some such? I fail to see how google redistributing news can even on the surface rate as "fair use", but of course, I am not a lawyer, so I'll suggest a different test.

would google object to someone building a commercial service out of, say "fair use" of google's services? say, indexing their top 10 search results for every keyword, or using some clippings from the middle 3 levels of zoom on google maps, but scraping the advertising, and just linking to the original page?

after all, it is like watching a preview of the whole service, right? i am sure they wouldn't, and I am sure they have never ever stopped startups from creative use of their web services, right?

Posted Tuesday 24th April 2007 20:47 GMT

Hanin Elias

Me too! Me Too!

this is yet another case of attention-wh0reism. i don't agree with the idea that anyone has a "right" to be the only one to report on a story. but that's neither here nor there. i don't know how popular that news site is, but i'd be willing to bet it wouldn't be half as successful without google and the other search engines. if it's not google, it'll be another search provider. these guys just can't come to terms with the reality of the service news aggregation provides them... and for free! the greater majority of "their" stories wouldn't even get read nor would they get any advertising revenue if these search providers did not get the word out for them. i work in several different offices and while shoulder-surfing, i see that all of the bored office slaves use google news and other news filters, that use varying levels of advertisment, rather than be locked into just 1 news source. this even for the utterly boring local news from this remote sliver of land! it seems like people believe they should profit from absolutely any use of anything they "produce". these days will soon come to an end, i just wonder wot they'll be charging you for then......