Howcum magazines aren't demanding a slice for Google's use of their content?
With book publishers successfully taking on Google over digitization of their content, how come magazines and newspapers aren't following suit? asks The Century Foundation in a posting. Since the $125 million settlement implicitly acknowledges that information is not free.
This leads to an obvious, critical question: Why aren’t newspapers and news magazines demanding payment for use of their stories on Google and other search engines? Why are they not getting a significant slice of the advertising revenues generated by use of their stories via Google?
Labels: online
posted by D. B. Scott at
10:53 am
3 Comments:
As a web person I am just laughing a bit at the idea that Google should pay magazines for their content.
Google is one of the largest sources of traffic for magazine websites (and importantly, NEW eyeballs to seduce into a subscription) - hence providing them with their revenue.
Unlike the books situation, Google is not housing the magazine information - it's just providing a pointer to it on the publishers' sites.
I think it might be easier to consider Google a distribution network.
(This doesn't hold true for all news sources, but it's definitely true for magazines.)
Well, I'm not very familiar with the terms of the book deal, but isn't the answer simple: with the books, Google was themselves displaying the content, whereas with mags and newspapers, they are merely linking to the content? (IE, no copyright infringement if they aren't copying the content.)
...because web sites heavily rely on Google for audience and traffic driving. Google is the biggest "friend" of magazine web sites, and taking them on re: this issue would be a big mistake.
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