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Google News Under Fire Around the World

Posted By Dominick Severance, Jan 17, 2013

Google News is a service that aggregates the day’s news by pulling headlines and snippets of news articles from major media companies and presenting those headlines and snippets in an easy to digest format. Users of the service can view hundreds of headlines very quickly and, if they click on the links in the headlines, Google will direct them to the original website so they can continue reading the rest of the article. Media companies from France, Belgium, and Brazil have complained that by grabbing just the headlines and snippets, users can get the gist of an article without feeling like they have to click the link to be directed to their websites.

Whether Google infringes copyright law by grabbing headlines and linking to the original article is a contentious issue. In defense of Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation supports Google and came out with the statement, “Links and citations to articles do not infringe copyright, as links do not copy, distribute, or perform any copyrighted work.” Publishers, however, believe that such unauthorized taking does constitute copyright infringement. (Note that websites can easily use a simple piece of code to prevent Google News from indexing their website for news.)

At the behest of these publishers, France and Germany are currently considering legislation that would require Google to pay a commission for the headlines and snippets it grabs for Google News. Google has started campaigns in both countries to prevent the bills from becoming laws. Google claims that Google News actually increases traffic to newspaper websites and, should such legislation pass, Google would have to pull all newspaper websites from Google related sites from those countries.

This isn’t the first time Google has faced this situation. In 2006, a Belgian newspaper group sued Google in Belgium requesting that Google withdraw all articles, photographs, and graphics of Belgian publications from Google News or face a daily fine of €2,000,000. The court referenced that Google News circumvents the original publishers’ advertising on their home sites and ruled that Google had to withdraw all the named content from “all their sites.”

Google took the Belgian ruling literally and removed the content not only from Google News but also from Google generally. Thus, if a user did a Google search for the content, it would not appear on any of Google’s sites. The newspaper group called Google’s move harsh and brutal. Eventually, Google and the newspaper group reached an agreement that saw the return of the newspapers content to all of Google’s sites except Google News. The case is still ongoing with Google probably going to appeal to Belgian’s version of the US Supreme Court after back to back losses at the trial and appellate levels.

Recently, in Brazil there is an association of newspapers that represents 90% of Brazil’s newspaper industry. After two years of working with Google News, the association reported that Google News did not, in fact, drive additional traffic to member websites. Earlier this year, the association announced that its members were going to opt out of Google News. Since then, the association reports that its members have only seen a 5% drop in traffic. Such results may embolden France, Germany, and Belgium in their push against Google. Either way, Google News is in the crosshairs and Google is under fire around the world for its news aggregator.

Source (CNN): http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/21/technology/google-french-links/index.html

Source (Google): http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.be/2012/10/the-facts-about-our-position-on-french.html

Source (Ars Technica): http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/07/google-versus-belgium-who-is-winning-nobody/

Source (Techcrunch): http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/26/brazils-google-news-boycott-reportedly-only-drops-traffic-5-oof/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Source (theverge): http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/21/3534782/brazilian-newspapers-boycott-google-news

Source (EFF): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/european-newspapers-seek-royalties-simply-linking-and-citing-news-content