"European publishers warned Tuesday that they cannot keep allowing Internet search engines such as Google Inc. to make money from their content. 'The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years,' said Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, in prepared remarks for a speech at a Brussels conference," reports AP.
"His stance backs French news agency AFP, which is suing Google for pulling together photos and story excerpts from thousands of news Web sites."
AP quotes Balsemao saying:
"It is fascinating to see how these companies 'help themselves' to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people's content."
Google made the obvious response:
Google spokesman Steve Langdon said: "Search engines do not reproduce content. They help users find content by pointing to where it exists on the Web."
Comment: Seems to me that unhappy publishers can take action on their own. All they have to do is put their content behind closed (password protected) doors and/or put "no spidering" commands in their robots.txt files. It will be interesting to see how well their companies do after they go "dark". Alternatively, they could at least offer Google suitable payments for, in effect, advertising their sites and delivering customers. Advertising and customer acquisition costs can be much higher than copyright fees.....
