Content Owners to Charge Royalties for Searching? 203
dwarfking writes in with a story that follows up on the impact of recent Google events: "Ok, maybe I'm a little dense here, but isn't this plan more of an impact to the content provider than to the search engines. From the article: 'In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.'
So, ok, a search engine company decides it doesn't want to pay royalties and therefore doesn't index the provider's site. Now won't the provider actually lose readers since their articles won't be locatable by search anymore?"
Dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes it extra dumb is the fact that it basically is an inverse of Google's targeted ads, if I'm getting this straight. Site owners already pay Google to have their link shown when people search for related material. And now, apparently, some of them expect Google to instead pay them for the exact same thing? Really, really dumb...
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Dumb (Score:5, Informative)
They claimed the exclusive right to control mention of their computer in print. If you published a BASIC program to run on it, or an article about how to use it, their lawyer would show up demanding that you pay royalties or desist. Magazines resorted to talking about "S-80 Bus" computers, which was sufficiently generic.
They got their wish, of course: you can read all the computer magazines you want without seeing anything about Radio Shack computers.
rj
"shenanigans" = almost all traditional scholarship (Score:2)
With the advent of Google Scholar and Microsoft Live Academic this may be changing (hopefully [lisnews.org]), but cases like this show its a constant tug of war between the profiteers and those that support the free distribution of info
More Brainwaves over at the pub. industrry! (Score:2)
Re:Is it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
"hese media outfits have very talented economists, financialists, and lawyers working for them. These are people who can accurately predict what will happen if the media companies were to take this course of action. They know how consumers will respond, and they know how it will affect their company's bottom line."
I hope you're just trolling. Most analysts in any field aren't worth shit when it comes to making predictions. That's why there are so many product failures every year, and why for every winner in the stock market, there's at least one loser.
Media people are among the most clueless. Take a look at how many movies bomb, at how many magazines die every year, how many tv shows don't go beyond the first season, how many newspapers are having to cope with declining readership
http://www.naa.org/marketscope/pdfs/Sunday_Nationa l_Top50_1998-2005.pdf [naa.org] Sorry, its one of those darned pdfs.
Sample stats:
1998 - 135,000,000 adult population, 92,000,000 readers
2005 - 150,000,000 adult population, 89,000,000 readers.
So, while the potential market has grown more than 10%, their readership has declined 4%.
Re:Is it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
At the same time, my first reaction is that this is retarded.
Huh?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Same fellows who predicted the precipitous decline of the daily newspaper?
With advice like that, they can stop the presses now.
Re:Is it, though? (Score:4, Interesting)
But is it really "dumb"? I don't have any doubt that these media outfits have very talented economists, financialists, and lawyers working for them. These are people who can accurately predict what will happen if the media companies were to take this course of action. They know how consumers will respond, and they know how it will affect their company's bottom line.
The question, though, is whether those smart people are actually allowed to make the final decision. This is the newspaper indstry we're talking about. The same industry that is *still* making you start an account and sign in to track what you read. This pisses a lot of people (like me) off, who end up not coming back to the site. Not only that, 90% of that information can be tracked by simply logging IP. So they turn away advertising revenue because of a completely antiquated practice.
So no, it's not surprising that companies like that would fail to figure out that search engines are FREE FUCKING ADVERTISING.
Go check out some of the recent articles on Techdirt, this is one of the author's favorite pet peeves. The upshot is that the newspaper industry has its collective head up its ass and completely fails to understand this whole internet thing. The recent developments in Belgium and France, where newspapers have sued google to avoid being cached, demonstrate this principle in action.
If I'm google, I tell them go ahead - your funeral.
Re: (Score:2)
big corporations having a clue about anything to do with the internet? not likely.
What's wrong with that? (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong with that? (Score:4, Interesting)
Saying that search engines are becoming publishers because they create, aggregate, and cache content to help users FIND content from publishers seems to be just a little off the mark.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
News publishers
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If they are competitors, then search engines such as Google should just de-list that publisher from ALL their searches until further notice from that publisher that they want to be listed after all. If said publisher notices a precipitous drop in their page views, they WILL come crawling back on their hands an knees to be re-instated.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of this board is discussing the wrong game. Content is a cost center - content provi
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, the fiduciary responsibility of a publicly held company is to maximize shareholder value.
Value and profit are two very different things. You can easily make a company profitable by liquidating the assets and firing all the employees. Your profit will be great for a quarter.
The rub comes when you are determining "value", and most importantly, over what period of time. If you presume that shareholders want the company to
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm definitely not saying that liquidating assets is a good way to make a profit. But in a strict sense, if it makes more money come in than has left, then it's a profit. Anything projected for the future is just a projection and not guaranteed. By focusing on profits right NOW, the decision sacrifices the future.
Now, this is an extreme example. But there are countless example
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that searches such as Google really straddle the line with how they present their search results, presenting content almost like RSS aggregators.
I think it's easy to make a good argument that they want to provide the same type of service but with the added value of more sources, so as to attract eyeballs. Googl's not in it for humanity, you know.
Re:What's wrong with that? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that just isn't true.
Yahoo quite obviously is a publisher. In fact, Yahoo has formal distribution agreements in place with many news providers, including a number of major newspapers, and pays agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press a considerable amount of money in licensing fees. The same is true of MSN and AOL.
You may not regard Google as a publisher, but it is. The problem is that Google publishes content that belongs to others.
Google scrapes content from websites and constructs news presentations that include headlines, photographs and summaries that do not belong to Google. It does not secure permission to reuse that content. It doesn't pay the writers or the editors or the photographers or the news agencies.
I'm not at all convinced that the Belgian newspapers are responding to the situation in the right way. But a knee-jerk reaction that Google is good and the publishers are bad is very naive.
If you look at Google's scattered EULAs and TOS documents you'll discover that they are very one-sided. Google can take your content and make pages containing ads. You can not take Google's content (RSS feeds, for instance) and make pages containing ads. If you sign up for Google's advertising programs you're not allowed to disclose certain information about the program to others. You can't put Google Adsense on the same page as any other content-targeted advertising. And so on.
Sauce for the goose is apparently not for the gander. From the Google News terms of service: "For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service."
Google has made great hay out of its "Do No Evil" slogan, but some of its practices, such as collaborating with governments that do not recognize the fundamental human right of freedom of speech, make me wonder.
The argument that search indexing is good for publishers has also several problems.
First of all, whether it's good or bad for the publisher isn't relevant to the question of legality. If I steal an apple and tell 40 friends how good it is, the market may actually gain new customers and come out ahead. But I'm still stealing an apple. The question of whether Google's screen-scraping amounts to apple-stealing is one for the courts to resolve, and apparently the Belgian courts have taken a position not friendly to Apple.
Second, the typical Slashdot poster's naive assumption that traffic == wholesome goodness isn't true. It doesn't work that way.
Most newspapers, for historical reasons, have an economic model that is built on advertising by businesses that are trying to reach specific customers in a highly restricted geographic region. This is particularly true in the United States; models vary in other countries, but most have a strong regional press.
Because of the global nature of the Internet, the vast majority of traffic brought in by search engines is of no interest to local and regional advertisers.
"Noise" traffic actually works against the site by depressing clickthrough rates and lowering the apparent effectiveness of CPM-based advertising.
As I said, I'm not jumping onto the Belgian publisher's bandwagon, but I'm also not jumping onto Google's. This is not so simple as that.
Re: (Score:2)
There is no reason to wonder. Google is a corporation. Corporations, on the account of having no heart, soul or conscience, are incapable of being anything but diabolical, in the D&D sense of the word (lawful evil, the ultimate being the devils). What this means is that a corporation will do
Robots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, robots.txt is only a request; search engines can ignore it (and I believe that some do).
So's a court order. (Score:2)
When you get right down to it, a court order is basically a request too, it just has some more weight behind it, if you happen to live in that court's jurisdiction.
I think that a robots.txt file would be something like a "No Trespassing" sign; if you had one, and then you were cached or spidered and went to court, it would give you a b
Re: (Score:2)
Since your IP doesn't change, that isn't exactly hidding from detection. It IS, however, much nicer to a small server (T1 or less), rather than running curl or wget at full tilt and swamping it.
I think your first point is the main point: A site should not be able to take action against a search engine if they are not using a robots.txt file that prohibits c
Re: (Score:2)
So that's two routes the publishers could have taken to achieve the same thing.
It seems like the issue is that publishers want to remain in Google, they just want to find ways to get paid for it. They're looking for a third option between "Play by google's rules" and "take our content and go home."
On the other hand, I was under the strong impression that "ind
greed... (Score:3, Informative)
NAA (Score:2)
Although I do find it funny that the NAA (http://www.naa.org) is made searchable through a Google Mini appliance.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Submitter has hit the nail on the head. (Score:5, Insightful)
"You'll shoot your eye out! You'll shoot your eye out!"
Side note - anyone else lose their login cookie this morning only forced to log back in and fill out a captcha? Weirdness. Worse, I saw no option for the visually impaired to log in either. Tsk tsk tsk....guys, come on. I'm not meaning to toss flames around, but you've got to provide some sort of opt-out link for those who can't see your captcha images.
Re:Submitter has hit the nail on the head. (Score:5, Insightful)
Any 'content holder' that whines needs the same thing done to them with no option for reindexing without paying enough to bleed them white or better donating a large chunk of their content to the public domain.
Usage and abusage (Score:2)
Re:Since when did the world work for Google? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have a site on the www, it means it can be queried by ANYONE. Regardless of if you like it or not. To say otherwise would be to broadcast a message on FM radio and complain that someone heard it and spoke about it.
There are ways around this: password protection and robots.txt.
The world does not work for google, rather google works
Re: (Score:2)
The news service's webmaster has no such excuse. This isn't a matter of intellectual property vs. the "electronic commons", it's a matter of incompetence vs. greed.
Re: (Score:2)
Content providers and search engines need each other. Anyone can create all sorts of cool content, but if it cannot be found, what good is it? Google is to the internet as the yellow pages to a phone book. A business has to PAY in order to be listed in the yellow pages. Here these businesses are complaining that they get listed for FREE. Free advertising almost always helps the bottom line of any business.
Re: (Score:2)
There are sites and services Google News must access to remain credible. The throw-away weekly shopping paper from Nowhere, Nebraska is not a substitute for the WSJ.
Microsoft would like nothing better than to become the news channel, the portal, for the decision-makers in this world.
Only if the search engines hang tough (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Lawsuit (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like rounds for suing the search engine for lost revenue to me !
"Your honor, by refusing to pay our fee the search engine is not only depriving us of our fair due, but also giving an unfair competitive advantage to our competitors. We demand that they add us to their search database and pay our very reasonable fee for accessing our pages."
And if anyone mods me funny, well... that's one naive fellow, then.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Google: "Your honor, is opposing counsel really suggesting that we are required to do business with them against our wishes?"
Of course, the suit would never get that far. Here's a summary of unfair competition [cornell.edu] law.
Re: (Score:2)
Willfully stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like robots.txt?
This sounds like willful ignorance. All the search engines mention it as the method to avoid having particular content indexed. They might not read RFCs but a quick peek at the help pages on the search engines in question would've answered this (and squashed the lawsuit) in no time.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait - are you implying that greedy businessmen want a cut of something for essentially no effort? What are you, a communist or something?
I agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Anything sufficiently popular and time-sensitive
nyse
nasdaq
ebay
craigslist
Hey! I got a better idea (Score:5, Funny)
And put in your earplugs
put on your eyeshades
you know where to put the cork...
Oops, there goes another violation.
Robot.txt is a machine readable permissions model (Score:5, Insightful)
They already have this. It's called the robot.txt file. You can use it to tell search bots not to index you. This just seems to be a richer permissions model, that includes things like caching and excerpting options.
In the longer term, I agree that this hurts content providers more than Google. Overall, it makes the search index less useful. However, it makes the content unfindable. Content that uses this will simply be replaced by content that does not.
Why would Google pay to provide better search results for content? It would make more sense for them to pay for the content direct so that they could have an exclusive. Or for content to pay to appear in the search results, like with Yahoo.
The dying gasps of print publishing (Score:2)
No, it's a great idea ! (Score:2)
- The Managing Staff Of The New York Titantic ^H^H^H^H^H^H mes
This could cripple content owners who do this (Score:5, Insightful)
There will always be smaller news outlets who want to get additional daily viewers. They want Google to direct people to their site. If the large news organizations want to opt out, there will always be someone to take their place.
When you look at Google news, you see a brief summary of the news article and then when you click on it, you are directed to that website. The website will earn revenue from their advertising. If they have an attractive and useful website, people may go to their site directly. New unique users. Often I find that after I've read an article I found through a search, I will go to the homepage of the site (through the hacking known as modifiying the URL) and look at their other articles. Most websites would pay Google to have links to them, now some sites want to Google to pay them? Google will just ignore them and their competitors will prosper.
Doesn't slashdot do something similar. Someone reads something interesting on the web and suddenly there's a link to it. I'm sure if some sites wanted to charge a fee to slashdot, they would promptly be ignored.
The idea that comes to mind is revenue stream. Someone working for the news organizations came up with the thought "Google has lots of money, let's take it" and so it began.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have the faintest idea of what the cost of entry is here?
Most cities count themselves lucky to have a single marginally competent daily newspaper. One TV station that rises above the "Eyewitness News" level. Where I live there is one regional upstate paper that is worth
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A Canadian search engine that ignored the Globe and Mail, McClean's and the CBC would be next to useless. Searchers will simply move on the alternative search engine. If you index financial news, you won't be taken seriously unless you include the WSJ
Re: (Score:2)
What makes newspapers any different than other businesses? Why not pass a law that forces all phone companies to publish all businesses that have a phone in their yellow pages and pay each business for being listed? What makes a search engine different from the yellow pages? Are they not anything more than a world wide electronic yellow pages?
Fair enough (Score:4, Insightful)
i.e. Lets say The Guardian the Independent charged a royalty for indexing certain articles. and the Times didn't then when a person searches for something that would under normal circumstances return all 3 content providers articles (say you are searching on current news - or better an archived new story - say the search is for "Falklands War Newspaper Headlines" or something. Instead of getting all three papers returning a result you would get just the one from the times.
Now assuming not everyone knows that certain papers charge search engines for permission to index their content, it will simply look like the Guardian and the Independent didn't report the Falklands War - or whatever you searched for.
Repeatedly this may even turn customers against their traditional sales, especially with more and more people using multiple online papers and buying a paper copy. I mean if you start reading the Times on-line everyday as it is the only remaining fully indexed paper, are you more or less likely to buy it when you decide to get a real copy? I guess it would do wonders for international brand recognition too - I mean if you are not indexed for common searches who is going to know who you are enough to trust you for the occasional bit where you have allowed yourself to be indexed.
Really this is all about the fact that search engines generate advertising revenue for themselves using others content, content providers are now looking and saying -
"hey Google makes X million dollars by directing people to my site and advertising for my competitors, it indexes my content (goggle images / news etc..) so people aren't coming directly to me, maybe If i threaten the source of their content they will pay me and I can finally make some money from this inter web thing without having to actually charge people ourselves!"
I guess this is an attempt to get at the revenue they assumed that they would get from selling content to their visitors directly through online subscriptions which didn't work. (unless you were a specialist or exclusive provider - such as companies providing financial information / stock prices / adult material etc..). It didn't work because others didn't charge, why pay for access to ITV news or CNN online (if they charged) when the BBC or some other organisation offered the same stories (with a different editorial slant..) for free?
What they should be saying is how can I get a search engine to get as many people to my site as possible where I can then try and sell whatever services or exclusive content I want! after all the more page hits the more (theoretically at least) conversions.
Anyway - let them try and charge a royalty - or enforce their rights regarding copyright and prevent thee search engines from making money by including their content in their search engines, it will only harm them.
The internet really is a level playing field, anyone with a good site can get listed on a search engine and get hits - hopefully achieving whatever it is they are trying to do, why do some people want to change it so that it benefits them more? all that will happen is that it will break the way the internet works, or is perceived and damage their own web activities. Plus some content providers simply will never do this (probably at least) the BBC in the UK certainly would find it difficult, so too will other public service information providers (I assume) too so I guess there will always be at least one or two news site out there.
I know I have focused on newspapers here (and that does appear to be the gist FTA) but providers of other content such as music, video, software etc. are in the same position. Problem is the internet using public like getting stuf for free, and probably wont pay for something if they cant have access to it for free for at least a while first.
Ah well, (By the way I'm absolutely
Re: (Score:2)
During a basic primer on HTML (and HTML is not *that* complicated at all) most people will go glassy-eyed and believe whatever the majority of "experts" say.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Forget knee-jerk reactions... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, there is a legitimate downside to being listed on Google News - all of your competitor news sources are also listed - right next to you. If the New York Times runs a piece from the Associated Press, I can see that the Des Moines Register runs the same story, why go to the big name source? The NYT has spent decades and millions of dollars building their reputation and get listed next to other, less-known papers. It serves to dillute their name and reputation.
For those of you convinced that you can get plenty of news from other places and that these print publications can adjust to new business models or die, are you crazy?!? One nice thing about having a huge newspaper is that they generally try to verify their stories, or at least avoid making things up. (I said generally...) When your paper owns buildings and huge printing presses and is sold at every newsstand your reputation means something. If you are a few people working out of a basement, then who cares? As long as you got people reading, you are happy. I like the idea of responsible journalism. It may be less than it was, but if I see it in the NYT I am inclinded to believe it. If it is in some tabloid, I am inclined to not believe it. In a strictly Internet world, how do you tell the difference?
I hope that a good arrangement is made between the press and the search engines, but I don't think the survival of the press is based on them being indexed by Google.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Google News a lot. It makes it very easy to find a news article I would not find otherwise; I get annoyed when Google News shows a site which, when i click on the Article doesn't let me view it because I need to be registered. My solution? Follow the next link as it will likely not have the registration requirement.
News sites are going to have to understand something, except for those sites I choose to go to on a daily basis the rest are secondary. I won't go to them unless there is a story of interes
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly, you aren't familiar with the history of the New York Times.
Re: (Score:2)
Not a direct search of course, but I have searched for stuff I wanted to buy and their site was among the top to show that I could get it form them, among others. There are also sites for shopping comparisons which help users find things.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No more than having the NYT sitting next to the Des Moines Register at a newsstand.
Please stop already! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Further, the analogy was about how they are demanding this way to opt out of search engines and how vital it is they have this...when it already exists and they only have problems because they aren't already using the
Public domain (Score:2)
It would be totally unlike a music CD where it's not free to download, hence a site couldn't necessarily crawl and put it up there for everyone to see.
Since the website was free for anyone to see in the first place, no harm done. Unless the site requires a subscription and if Noogling that bypasses it, there really isn't anything that can be done I think.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Secondly, unless its changed since I last bothered with it, robots.txt can't allow indexing but prevent caching, and nor can it actually prevent anything. Robots.txt is a *request* to a user agent to not enter certain parts of a domain. User agents are perfectly at liberty to ignore the request, although doi
Re: (Score:2)
If the site is freely accessible to anyone, shouldn't it be considered "fair" for someone to index that site on a search engine?
About the robots.txt exclusion thing, although it's not political law, it's almost good enough to use in common law, correct? Doesn't robots.txt indicate that the site does not want to be crawled?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
COPYright is not the same as INDEX right. A library may not COPY a book, but they may index it in their catalog so a user may find that book in the stacks. A librarian does not have to ask the publisher for permission to put the book's vital locating info into a catalog. Google does NOT copy a site, but only indexes it just the same as a library would a book so a user can find the site. Why should *any* site be able to
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Payola (Score:3, Interesting)
on second thoughts...
Perhaps the record companies and musicians union might ask the RIAA to "cease and desist"?
SOmeone has lost the plot here. Must be me!
Why stop there? (Score:3, Insightful)
And when writing a story about me, or my company, I deserve royalties too. Sure, you might argue that publicity is valuable, but I say that without ME and my circumstances, these content owners would have nothing to write about.
And, obviously, my dear old mum deserves royalties too. After all, without her genetic contributions, I couldn't exist, couldn't do anything news worthy, couldn't be the basis of a content owner's story.
And lets not forget about Grandma. And great-grandma.
And of course, I am writing this comment on a MacBook, so its only fair that Apple gets a piece of any slashdot ad revenues generated by people reading this.
And, obviously, those interested in clicking on the slashdot ads are using Amazon's patented "click" technology, so they deserve a cut too.
No Google news for french-speaking Belgium (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds good in the board room (Score:2)
This is one of those ideas that sounds good in the board room and eventually reaches daylight because no one has the nads to stand up and say it's a really dumb idea that will ultimately be counter-productive. I run into the management group-think attitude all the time. And the dummer it is, the more likely there's some hard-headed, gung-ho upper-level manager determined to ram it through. As if being tough, determined and dogmatic magically transforms it into a better idea.
Almost as dumb as charging c
this is beautiful (Score:3, Interesting)
here's the formula i worked out for the way it works right now:
(site advertisment click probability * click price * readers) + (subscription signup probability * subscription price * readers) = revenue
this is how it will work if they charge royalties:
(royalties per click * 0 + (site advertisment click probability * click price * 0 + (subscription signup probability * subscription price * 0) = revenue = 0
Beginning of online content monopolies (Score:2)
the only way this could work... (Score:2)
but if a few content providers 'cheat' - that is, make private side deals with one or more search engines, then the royalty system will very likley break down.
one way search engines could break the content
Re:Not as clear cut as it sounds (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is making money on their unique ability to gather, index, and make sense of all of the seperate news articles being created. They can show you news stories about related items from different sources around the world. They are making money on the service which lets you actually see the news from different points of view.
This is very different, and the content creators had nothing to do with this. This is a service on top of their service, and they deserve nothing from it. Google does provde the opt out option either by contacting them, or by simply using the robots.txt.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
No more nor less stupid than charging money for any other form of recorded music/literature online. A recording artist makes money by selling his sound recordings, a lyricist makes money by selling his text recordings.
If you purchase a sound recording or sheet to learn the lyrics, the lyricist gets paid. If you download a free sound recording or sheet, the lyricist does not.
So the question, as always, develoves back to
Re: (Score:2)
So the question, as always, develoves back to the root; the inherent validity of the copyright concept, whether or not you think that lyricists should get paid for using their works.
Good straw man. What about people who purchase a sound recording (thus paying the lyricist), then want to learn the lyrics...should they have to pay twice to the lyricist
Re: (Score:2)
Where do I sign up?
Re: (Score:2)
PAB
Re: (Score:2)
How about Congress authorizes creation of the CCCP (Coalition of Content Creators and Publishers)...
There, fixed that for you.
Cheers!
Strat
Re: (Score:2)