You Might Be Surprised at What Some in the Mainstream Media Call “Theft”

OVERVIEW: The threat by Mainstream Media outlets in Europe to force search engines to pay to list their content has far-reaching implications that have mostly been ignored.
____________________

I wanted to comment on Gavin O’Reilly’s speech last week, but expected it to get a lot of attention before I would be able to get around to it. It hasn’t happened: Blog reaction has been minimal. The blogs I found by doing a blog search on “Gavin O’Reilly” that did more than merely relay the story are noted below, and all but two of them didn’t catch on to the full extent of the threat.

I suppose that the State of the Union address, the ongoing China search engine censorship saga, and the horrid actions by Muslims who can’t handle cartoon caricatures against the Danes and others, have all made what Mr. O’Reilly said seem unimportant.

But, it is NOT unimportant — in fact, although their targets are currently search engines, if Gavin O’Reilly and his cohort have their way, what I am about to do will either be illegal, or will cost me (a briefer story is at Cnet if the Financial Times piece gets pulled behind their subscription wall; bolds are mine):

Search engines challenged on ‘theft’
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Media Editor in London
Published: January 31 2006 19:55

A group of newspaper, magazine and book publishers is accusing Google and other aggregators of online news stories of unfairly exploiting their content. They are demanding compensation from search engines.

Gavin O’Reilly, the president of the World Association of Newspapers, which is co-ordinating the campaign, said on Tuesday: “We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they’re building [their business] on the back of kleptomania.”

The group of publishers, which includes the International Publishers’ Association, the European Federation of Magazine Publishers and Agence France Presse, is seeking meetings with Charlie McCreevy, the European Union’s internal market commissioner, and Viviane Reding, the commissioner responsible for media. It would not rule out legal action to enforce copyright or “collective action,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “Ultimately, the aggregators need the content providers.”

Services such as Google News link to original news stories on the home pages of newspapers and magazines and display only the headline and one paragraph of the story. “That’s often enough” for readers browsing the top stories, Mr. O’Reilly said.

The Print Advertising Blog, an industry mouthpiece, calls it “exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners.” (which is interesting, since the Print Advertising Blog carries Google ads, and many of its blog entries are aggregations of long headlines.–Ed.)

So, by extension, anyone who reads a search engine news entry and doesn’t click through to the news site is stealing. (Next, I suppose Gannett will want a few pennies if I read the USA Today headlines through the news rack as I walk by it.)

First, they came for the search engines. Gee, I wonder who would be next?

O’Reilly’s speech may and the threat of legal action or government coercion appears to be the first shot in a protracted war between the WORMs (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, known to most as the Mainstream Media) and the online world over who gets to see content, where they get to see it, and at what cost.

The major search engines, all of whom are members of BizzyBlog’s Internet Wall of Shame, have placed themselves in a very weak position with the public by kowtowing to the Chinese government over search-engine result censorship. The WORMs can credibly argue that they are the ones breaking news in China that the rest of the world actually sees (BBC has done particularly well in this regard under what has to be very difficult circumstances), while Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are helping the Chinese government keep it away from their own people.

But make no mistake: This could get ugly — every bit as ugly as the possibility of a UN or EU takeover of Internet management that was the subject of so much concern last fall. If the WORMs force the search engines to stop at headlines in an attempt to force more clickthroughs (which I predict would happen, because I don’t believe the search engines will pay to run the first couple of sentences of every single news story or result), then they will go after anyone else who excerpts their articles and supposedly “steals” clicks from them.

The fact that many, if not most, readers only found the news because it was listed in a search engine, mentioned at a blog, or included at an aggregation site doesn’t seem to faze Mr. O’Reilly one bit. Mike at Techdirt wonders how they can be so clueless:

Just as stories are hitting the press about slow-to-innovate newspapers finally embracing the internet comes the news that a bunch of newspapers are quite upset that Google drives more traffic to their websites.

They’re not clueless, Mike. They either want users coming directly to them, or to force any intermediaries to pay for the “privilege” of being the conduit. Virtually all original content still comes through the WORMs. Unless and until that changes (and it is changing, but slowly), is it possibile that Gavin O’Reilly and his wannabe gatekeepers will get their way.

I would caution Mr. O’Reilly against overconfidence, though: Given the incredible things search engines and their robots are already doing, how difficult would it be for Google or some aggregator to sift through all of the coverage of major stories, jumble it up so that the source of the original material can’t be identified, and then simply run the resulting hashed-together content as their own news?

All of this bears watching, and deserves a lot more ongoing attention than it has received thus far.
______________________

Reax Roundup (let me know if I missed anyone):

• Miss Porcupine totally gets it — “So, basically, the newspapers say that by reading the first paragraph of a news story on Google News (or Yahoo News or MyWay or whatever else you use), you’re stealing from the newspaper. And that means that by quoting the above paragraphs, I am committing a crime against The Financial Times. They want copyright payments for every single quotation. Can you imagine that in the blogosphere? The ‘first paragraph’ bit is especially ludicrous in a world where newspapers provide RSS feeds for their own material.”
• The Ocean View gets it, and overreacts (maybe) — “Left UnChecked, These People Would “OutLaw” The Simple HyperLink (a.k.a Link) To ANY Website Outside of Your Own Domain!!! These Newspaper Publishers Are Just *MAD* Because They Didn’t Take The Internet Seriously, Soon Enough, & That, They Didn’t Think of “eBay”, 1st!”
• VLLB Linkblog has a bigger problem with caching of full-page content.
• Michael Fraase — “Google may not get it, but the publishing industry doesn’t even know that there’s something to get.”
• Cincom Small Talk: “If this were actually about controlling content, these publishers would have solved it already - by blocking the various search bots in robots.txt. Since they haven’t, we know it’s not actually about copyright. Instead, they want (just like the telcos!) to find a way to get deep pocketed Google to make charity payments to them.”
• Chosaq — “If there is no content, there is no need for an index. If there is content, you’ll need some sort of index. It’s that simple. So what is wrong with Google making that index? Maybe the fact that it shows competing media outlets on the same page, possibly inviting people to go elsewhere?”
• I Might Be in a Tree — “the only reason I saw this news story at all was because a content aggregator found it for me!”
• JimmyKat — “The ironic thing is that most news is put together by the wire agencies - AP, UPI, etc. - and the newspapers, et al. are only re-publishing the same story as every other publisher who subscribes to that news agency. In essence, they’re mad because Google is re-aggregating what they aggregated from other sources in the first place…and making money on it that they think belongs in their pockets instead.”
• Extranet Revolution — “I found (this FT article) thanks to Newsgator. In this instance, therefore, far from exploiting the FT’s content, Newsgator has enabled me to view an FT article (and some adverts) that I would otherwise have missed. At this level, it seems quite a good symbiotic relationship to me.”
• Search Engine Lowdown — “Hey WAN. Don’t like being in search engines? Tell your members to put up a robots.txt file to block the search engines, and they’ll be happy to drop them. When they do, then blogs and other news sources can have the traffic the search engines were previously sending to your members.”
• 4 Cents Worth (his and hers at 2 cents each-cute) — “Google News and other aggregators are free advertising for the paper and the content they hold. As advertising, the Newspapers should pay Google to be included. And rather than go down that road, why not just leave the collaboration free to both parties involved?”
• Good Morning Silicon Valley — “Newspaper association seeks Google’s help in assisted suicide”
  A Networked World — “Oh no, taking headlines and sometimes three whole lines of their precious text, my god what is the world coming to. Lets get rid of fair use right now shall we? It will save so much hassle.”
• Others: Britain Gallery, As I See It, Marketer Blog.