After winning a court victory against Google, Belgian newspaper publishers are now going for MSN ... with Yahoo and the rest presumably next in line. According to IDG News Service:
The newspaper group, called Copiepresse, wrote a letter to MSN Belgium earlier this week, asking it to stop posting Belgian newspaper articles to its Web site without permission, said Margaret Boribon, the group's secretary general.
Comment: Basically, the Belgian publishers want a share of the ad revenue from online news aggregation services, so MSN may be able to do a deal. Google has no ad revenue from Google News and, I assume, doesn't want to set a precedent. If you start sharing search ad revenue with newspapers then surely you ought to share it with other sites, bloggers, spammers etc, whose pages come up whenever you search Google.
Of course, you might decide that if Google (or whoever) is sending you loads of visitors that it would otherwise cost large sums to get, you should just put ads on your own pages and monetize traffic that way. However, if you think you are giving Google (or whoever) a free lunch by letting it steal your content, you might want a portion of that lunch for yourself.
