E-Media Tidbits

The official Google blog just posted a statement offering the company's perspective on the recent Belgian court's decision against Google News in a copyright infringement case.

According to Google, "Last week we asked the court to reconsider its decision and requested that the requirement to post the ruling on our home pages be suspended. The court on Friday 22nd September agreed to reconsider its ruling in November this year, but maintained the requirement that we must post the initial judgment to our home pages for five days or face a fine of 500,000 Euros a day."

I just checked the Belgian Google News home page. If you scroll all the way down to the very bottom, you'll see a dense bit of Dutch-language legalese -- that mentions the court of Brussels, so I guess Google has complied with that condition.

Google also wrote, "This case ...goes to the heart of how search engines work: showing snippets of text and linking users to the Web sites where the information resides is what makes them so useful. And after all, it's not just users that benefit from these links but publishers do too -- because we drive huge amounts of traffic to their sites."

I do think Google made a very strong point there. I don't understand why some news organizations are so adamantly opposed to having their content indexed and presented in Google News or similar aggregators. It's not like they're stealing and republishing the full text of articles, as the notorious and ambitious Spanish spam blog (splog) Bitacle has been doing. They're fostering findability, which increases the online audience for any news venue. Traffic is good, right? That's why you sell ads?

I can understand online publishers taking issue with how Google makes its cached pages publicly available. That, I think, could realistically be considered copyright infringement. But Google News? I doubt it.

I wish someone would explain to me how Google News supposedly constitutes more of a threat than an opportunity to news organizations. If you think you can make that case well, please comment below. I'd love to hear an explanation of that perspective that makes sound business sense.