Spanish scraper scrapped: Google axes Google News Google will close its Google News service in Spain next week, rather than pay newspapers for news excerpts. Spain recently revamped its copyright law and the changes take effect (PDF, Spanish) on 1 January. Law-makers threw newspapers a bone: the right to be remunerated by news aggregators. According to academic Eleonora …
"Oooh, you are gonna get SUCH a downvoting for that!"
What can I say? Truth hurts. I remember the browser wars too, and loads of FUD-spreading from the Microsoft faithful, and look how that turned out - 15+years on and there's still people holding grudges.
lol did you even read what happened?
Newspaper says pay up or go away so Google stops including their articles in Google News.
Fast-forward a bit and newspaper realises that most of its traffic is driven through Google News (not the search engine which still returns searches for the newspaper) so they come crawling back and ask to be included again.
If they have issues with copy-write of the snippets that Google use then that is fair enough, they can simply disable indexing/robots etc.
It seems strange that no one actually does though, obviously the newspapers get more value from the service than they believe their snippets are worth.
Google obviously make money indirectly from the service, so it is a symbiotic relationship. Certain publishers would much rather it be a parasitic relationship.
What is crap is that its been make a requirement. Shouldn't publishers get to choose if they want to use the service?
"Newspaper says pay up or go away so Google stops including their articles in Google News.
Fast-forward a bit and newspaper realises that most of its traffic is driven through Google News"
The music industry got taught a similar salutary lesson in the 1980s. They tried to make TV networks pay royalties for airing videos - so the New Zealand TV networks simply stopped airing music videos.
With sales down 90%, the industry held out about 3 months before they finally squeaked. The totality of their surrender was underscored by the fact that they _paid_ full-blown prime-time advertising rates to have "Thriller" aired (yes, it was that long ago).
That lesson still guides a lot of the industry worldwide, but the occasional refresher needs to happen - "new technologies" mean that Google takes the place of the TV networks and the effect can happen to any industry dependent on "free" advertising and goodwill for its sales.
"Google: ok, we won't pay so we'll remove your news headlines from our service... Where's the evil?"
The evil lies in the fact that thanks to the huge amount of internet real estate they control, Google can pretty much decide who get the publicity to stay in business, and who is dropped into obscurity and financial ruin.
It's like watching certain live football games a few years back when Sky had all the rights - if you wanted to, you could go digging around and chance watching it on some obscure Russian stream that also carried a payload of viruses (happened to my mother-in-law)...
... but most people would stump up and pay for Sky, because that was the only thing they knew. Same as the browser wars - even at that point, it was possible to choose a different browser... but most went with what was already there as part of what they already knew.
"The evil lies in the fact that thanks to the huge amount of internet real estate they control, Google can pretty much decide who get the publicity to stay in business, and who is dropped into obscurity and financial ruin"
The 'huge amount of internet real estate' they control.. is 'google.com'. Are you sure it's evil that they control their own website?
I *think* what you actually mean is Google are evil because of all the *eyeballs* they control. Except the owners of the eyeballs chose Google of their own free will. It's the combined effects of all this free will that you have the fundamental issue with. You must agree, without it, Google *have* no power. So Google *don't* actually control it. We do.
And why do you say you're describing 'evil' when you are actually describing 'big'? Yes, they have the capacity for evil. Everyone does. Yourself included. Why do you stop there?
If you show they are excluding the competition, instead of being actually just more *popular* than the competition, we'd have grounds for an actual discussion.
e.g. if you want to search for a news item, but don't know which news site it would be covered by, how would you find it? Explain how Google obstruct your free will and gain your eyeballs in an underhanded way
"I *think* what you actually mean is Google are evil because of all the *eyeballs* they control. Except the owners of the eyeballs chose Google of their own free will."
Ah, the old battle-cry of the Google supporter - "you can always choose not to use Google!"...
... but can you? As the AC has said above - if you have a directory for looking things up and you choose not to list your business in that directory then you're not going to get found and not do very much business.
The fact is that Google is the biggest "directory" on the internet by a country mile - period. To "choose not to use" is - unless you have a fantastic marketing budget - tantamount to business suicide. Go out onto the street and ask any average bod how you find something on the internet. I'd be willing to bet that at least 75% say "Google it" - a company name has now become a verb in common everyday use.
I'm not debating the hows and whys of how they got to this position as I don't have all the facts - although I will admit that Google do have a damn good search engine. But the point is that the internet real estate they have almost monopolistic control over is "search" - and therefore the power to control who gets discovered and who does not (including potential startup competitors and anyone Google "just doesn't like").
Ah, the old battle-cry of the Google supporter - "you can always choose not to use Google!"...
And while I peel this label off, and you rage at the public for freely choosing 'a damn good search engine', as you said, you're telling me it's stupid to not advertise where the largest audience is. Erm. Yes?
And two more paragraphs telling us again that Google is 'big', and has the 'potential' for evil. We know. You said. It's still not a point. Are you still not understanding why 'fear' alone isn't a good reason to kill people? Even 'big' people?
Seriously???
Imagine a business directory that listed all local companies for free which brought the largest amount of business to those companies. Any business could choose to be included or not.
Then, beyond the wishes of those companies, a law was made saying that the directory was illegal as the names of those companies were copyrighted. The directory closes and most of those companies then find their business reduced right down as their main traffic source has been stopped.
It's not even that, it's publishers who don't want to appear in Google News can't waive the right to a fee either.
There's a quango called CEDRO that collects the money on behalf of the publisher, whether the publisher is a member or not and whether the publisher wants it collected or not, takes its commission, and passes the rest on, if the publisher is a member. If the publisher is not a member then it has to ask for the money otherwise it stays with CEDRO. Then publishers than don't want to collect the fee make their own arrangements to return it to the indexer, less CEDRO's fee of course.
This is the same way that SGAE (Spanish RIAA/BPI) collects money by the way.
It's a combination of Spanish big media lobbying and another opportunity seen by inept corrupt politicians who have no idea about this Internet thing but have lots of ideas on how milk the foreign cash cow.
Just out of interest, do you know who sets the fee? Is it the publisher themselves, so they could set a notional fee of, say, 0.0001 Euro per article or is there a fixed fee imposed by CEDRO, who obviously have a vested interest in a minimum set fee as they want their cut?
I have a suspicion I already know the answer.
The law says that publishers "have the right to receive fair compensation" and leaves it at that.
As to how much that is, that's decided by the AEDE (a publishers association) which negotiates the rate with news aggregators. The AEDE decides the fee that CEDRO will collect on behalf of all Spanish publishers, not just its own members. It's not clear from the link below if fee is the same for all aggregators or there can be a different fee for each aggregator however it is clear that there will be a minimum fee.
http://www.expansion.com/2014/12/11/empresas/tmt/1418315577.html
It's a stitch up in other words.
I don't have a radio, nor a TV, and I sure as hell am not paying the local fishwrap MONEY for it's poorly researched typo-filled unedited crap.
As a matter of fact, my local paper switched to a website layout so spectacularly difficult to use, that the only way I can read stories from it is Google News.
"not paying the local fishwrap MONEY for it's poorly researched typo-filled unedited crap"
You must read the Canberra Times then. It's neither typo-filled, nor unedited, but, it's idea of research is to ask the Greens what to write. And if their phone is busy, then they ask their lapdogs, the Labor Party.
Yeah, convenient to criticize, difficult to create.
Google is very successful and you are simply jealous and will say anything to distract from their success.
What successful business did you create? Nothing? Oops, must be a monopoly of failure.
There is no "monopoly" other than Google has monopoly on success.
@dogged
"How are people going to find their news stories?"
In the context in which the sentence appears I took the pronoun "their" to mean the newspapers, not the readers. Ambiguous I guess. But also I don't know how you can search radio or TV. You have to passively listen to everything and hope the event/story you are interested in comes around. If the newspapers want interested Internet readers to be able to find their stories they have to let their content be indexed by the search providers.
And you depend on them reporting events accurately, although there are no prizes on getting accuracy on the internet/web either. Arguably, it can be even more inaccurate. In either case, I've been involved in some hairy situations and not once did I find accurate reporting either during or after the event. That's why I try to get differing sources accounts. The truth might be in there, some where (?).
[Just tried Google News for the first time in year and it insists that I receive the national site for where ever the VPN lottery lands. Today it's Thai. Okay. Oh in the Thai language although it does allow me to obtain English as an option. Lovely.]
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe they could listen to the radio or watch TV or buy a fucking newspaper.
How do you think?"
Why would I do that? It's 2014, almost 2015, I can have a collection of à la carte news at my disposal for free, covering multiple perspectives on an event.
You can wade through a two-hand tall stack of periodicals every day if you like. I'm happy having google do it and collate it for me. If some pissant publisher doesn't want google showing their headlines, that's fine, I'll just not read them.
> How are people going to find their news stories?
Buy a newspaper?
Yeah, yeah, I know. Like that's going to happen. To be serious, though, if I actually want to follow up a news story on the Web, I'm likely to go to one of my favourite/trusted publisher sites first, rather than to Google News. Odd, maybe. You wouldn't be the first to say so... :-)
>>So investing in the future of the country by providing training and research facilities <<
Is that what they're doing? You sure they're not just investing in the future of their own company? Wouldn't someone who wanted to invest in the country be a bit less desperate to avoid paying tax?
"Wouldn't someone who wanted to invest in the country be a bit less desperate to avoid paying tax?
"
That's a very inefficient way of investing in a country as you can’t be sure the monkeys in power aren’t going to piss the money up the wall ‘investing’ in vanity schemes rather than, say, improving the education system to produce people with useful qualifications. Far better to spend the money yourself and get the results you want.
And we're sure the monkeys in control of Google will be better why? Because they don't even have to scrape through an election to get in power? As long as they make money, that must be good for the country?
It's fine to spend your money for the results you want, but be honest about it, don't pretend it's for the greater good.
A battered government who is surrounded by corruption scandals touching the highest levels gets lobbied by a bunch of media moguls who don't understand neither the internet nor how their own business works. The deal is: big media will not hammer on them inasmuch as they deserve it in exchange for a slice of what they perceive is a cash cow they've not yet milked. What could possibly go wrong?
A few small media publishers warn of the consequences and are ignored. These smaller media already know that Google News is something like less than 3% of their traffic and that News royalties are not going to make them any significant money in royalties, and being removed from News is not going impact their traffic in any significant way either.
Talk about a storm in a tea cup. Except for the ex-pats who use the service to keep themselves up to date on the latest corruption scandals. And the few media executives hoping to add News revenues to their bonus targets. And the few government officials hoping for the revolving doors in those media conglomerates to pay back the -non existent- favor in the future.
Google certainly wants to avoid at all costs making a precedent. If they caved in in Spain, other countries would immediately create the exact same law. And would they stop at news web sites, or would they just go all the way and force Google to pay for giving results to any random web sites? "Look, you are showing advertising next to the IP of other people. You have to pay them for it."
Now that's a thought that should chill Google's blood.
I'm looking forward to when the Google Search engine returns the following message to any search:
It would be unfair for Google to provide you with links to what you are looking for without your going to the site first.You can start by looking here:
http://003.000.000.000/
http://003.000.000.001/
http://003.000.000.002/
http://003.000.000.003/
...
Wait. This seems to be describing the entire thing backwards. Because as I see it you:
- find a series of 1s and 0s
- give stupid politicians money to make stupid laws that allow you a monopoly on those 1s and 0s
- sue anyone who dares to use that series, or anything like it, related to it, deriving from it, featuring it, etc, etc
- repeat step 2 with ill gotten gains to get stronger laws, to sue more people, ad infinitum
All "rightsholders" are living on government handouts, because that is all their "rights" are. They do not exist in nature, no lion ever sued another for its unique roar. Its total, total, total bullshit, and you can all fuck right off.
There are those who are convinced it might be intended, the Spanish government keeps Spanish big media sweet with subsidies and favourable laws and makes life difficult for small independent publications which uncover corruption scandals.
I'm sure that the current culture minister being ex-director of Kantar Media (which has a paid-for version of Google News) and pushing this law wasn't a conflict of interest either...
In Europe many countries have a levy for "personal copy" rights of copyrighted contents, inflicted on each purchase of media or devices that *might* be used to store a copy - *MIGHT*.
They are enforced just because customers have not the power of Google of inflicting big damages to publishers which don't accept the "Google rule"? Antitrust laws were created exactly to avoid a company could reach that level of power and actually rule the market.
It's funny anyway how many people were terrorized by MS monopoy which actually didn't control contetns, and are perfectly OK with the far worser one of Google which is able to control the contents, and thereby what you find, read, and, eventually, think.
It is indeed "must read", expresses very clearly the perspective of organisations such as his (although i'm not entirely sure what he has against the Amish).
However, surely the "bottom line" with this issue is very simple: if Google does not want to pay the levy (the collection of which sounds incredibly silly, reading a previous comment), then it must not use or show that content. Therefore if it does not use or show that content, it does not have to pay the levy. End of story. Search engine does not list content, tough; Google is not using the content and is simply complying with that request.
If newspapers then want their content to be used (because it's no longer indexed by the search engine, say) then they are free to ask Google to use it - just as Google is free to say "of course we will, but we're not paying any levies, so if you still want us to use your content then ensure your collections agent / organisation does not even try, then we'll talk. Until then, we're off .... "
Definitely worth reading, I agree.
@AC - expresses very clearly the perspective of organisations such as his - I think he goes a lot further than that and raises the prospect that the difficulties of organisations such as his will be felt by the rest of us sooner or later.
You could read the letter as being simply paranoia, but I think there is much in it that should give cause for concern for all of us.
I agree that a content provider should have the right to charge for displaying their content on 3rd party sites. That's a no brainer.
I also agree that google (or other 3rd party sites) have the option to decline paying and therefore decline showing the content.
What I find hilarious are those people who think that having their headlines shown on 3rd party sites (with links back to them) is anything but free advertising. I think the spanish companies got exactly what they deserved. As long as google continues to provide a way to opt out of displaying content - which has been around for a long long time - then people whose stuff shows up on google that do not opt out have nothing to complain about.
Lol.
If so, then Google are still horribly naive. The EU might beat the crap out of them *just* for publicly defying them. You should already understand by now the EU doesn't *actually* care what the repercussions are - the Internet isn't *their* world.
Google excel at solving logical problems. This is *not* a logical problem. This is the Power game. This is politics. Alpha males and testosterone are base components.
"... copyright exists to encourage trade."
That's interesting. In my days spent frolicking in the fields of copyright, the common motivations for copyright have been quite varied, changing with jurisdictions as well as with the times: from encouraging the creation of works, encouraging investments in creative enterprises, safeguarding cultural expressions, protecting artistic integrity or even to just give creators "their due". But "encouraging trade" is not a justification I have seen raised as its raison d'être before. In trademark law, for sure, but that is quite another beast.
> from encouraging the creation of works, encouraging investments in creative enterprises, safeguarding cultural expressions, protecting artistic integrity or even to just give creators "their due".
To be fair, the first, second, and fifth of those are achieved by encouraging trade. But good point anyway.
But, even if we assume that copyright exists to encourage trade, this bit is still silly:
The argument against levies is a fundamental one: copyright exists to encourage trade. If, instead of trading and market building ...
Trading what and building what market? The implication here appears to be that content producers, by asking for money for their content, are not trading and are not participating in a market. Surely that's the opposite of the truth. They are creating a market in which Google may participate in trade for their content. It is Google who are refusing to trade and are doing their damnedest to stop the market being built.
The point that it may be a bad idea to charge for content in this case is well taken, but is a side issue. Companies should be allowed to make mistakes that backfire.
I mean, Facebook can be considered a content aggregator. The aggregation is done, in this case, mostly by human(oid)s, rather than by bots, but when someone posts a link to a news site, a thumbnail and excerpt of the original site appear in the timeline. It seems to me that that this is infringing at least as much as Google news -- at best, it can be argued that Facebook infringes retail, while Google News does it wholesale, but I don't see how that makes a difference of KIND, rather than merely one of DEGREE.
Does Facebook have a local presence in Spain? If so, does the "rights" agency go after FB next? And -- if A and B -- what do they do when FB decides to close its local presence and block local access?
Good point, but there's a big difference: take away the links, and Google has no content. Facebook wouldn't shut down their Spanish operation; they'd just stop posting excerpts from links posted in Spain -- and still have plenty of other content left.
It has taken me most of the day to find the courage to write a comment on this new Spanish Law. Amongst other reasons, cause it makes me ashamed of being Spanish, and I can't stop finding negative consequences every time I stop fuming long enough to begin thinking clearly about the issue.
They have severely curtailed the Spanish People's right to quality information. They have also curtailed the Blogosphere's ability to find and disseminate data. Small news papers and small on line news sources will find it far more difficult to reach potential readers, and their content will be crushed by the weight of Big Media and their higher rankings. And Big Media is easier to control than Small Media, so several levels of censorship can be applied.
At the end of the day, the public and Big Media will be the ones paying for the drinks, the public by losing access to quality info/dissenting opinions and Big Media when they notice that they are actually losing money with this Law.
And it's a nice tool for censoring any opposing public opinion from blogs. It's trivial to use this shit to block access to dissenting sites.
Goebbels would have been proud! Spanish Govt.= Motherfucking thieves!!!
</rant>
Steam pressure going down. For now...
Steam pressure going down. For now...
That's the operative phrase: For now. We have our idiots over here trying to deliver we, The People, to The Powers That Be, as well. I used to have low blood pressure. The last two years have seen it move to the normal range.
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