It’s for this reason that nobody knows which UK news groups are involved (the previous arrangements involved the Associated Press, Agent France-Presse, and Copiepress).  Yet the Sunday Herald’s Steven Vass, who broke the story, writes, “it looks likely that [Google] has bowed to pressure from news groups.”

Vass also reported the history of Google News, which “had long maintained that it was not in breach of copyright rules because it carries only the headline and the opening couple of sentences from each story in its service.”  And, aside from not breaking any laws, Google News “was benefiting news groups by directing traffic to their websites.”

It seems that the search engine corporation abandoned those arguments, however, at least in its dealings with those “several large UK news groups.”  This may, as the alleged reason for the deal’s secrecy implies, lead to other organizations demanding the same payment.  They might even demand the same payment from other news sites.

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick noted a “really sinister explanation” behind this possibility, writing, “[S]ome are suggesting for this is that Google knows that it can afford to pay off these newspapers – while not many other sites can.  So, effectively, Google may be paying off these newspapers not because of real legal threats, but because it knows that the legal threats will be pointed instead to other competitive services who are less able to weather such legal challenges.”

Assuming that a deal between Google News and some UK news organizations did indeed take place, and if we’re to believe that the theory Masnick relayed is correct, well . . . Machiavelli, eat your heart out.

The per diem penalty for noncompliance was at least dropped to more reasonable levels. In the initial ruling, Google would have to pay 1 million euros for every day it did not comply with the ruling. The new judgment dropped that fee to 25,000 euros daily.

Google also said the company was "very pleased that the judge agreed Google should be given notice of articles and other material that content owners want removed."

The company has maintained in other arenas, when copyright concerns have been broached, that by showing only snippets of copyrighted text and linking out to original sources, no copyright laws have been violated. The Belgian court was the first to completely disagree.

That doesn’t mean Google’s stopped arguing their case. From Google’s statement:

We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites.

If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content.

These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines. In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners.

If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index—all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.

– Rachel Whetstone, European Director of Communications and Public Affairs, Google, Inc.

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews: