60M Euro Smooths Relations Between Google and French Publishers 61
New submitter Flozzin writes with news of some resolution to the long-standing dispute that some French publishers have had with Google for republishing snippets of news reports without sharing revenue earned from the ads run alongside. Now, reports the BBC, "Google has agreed to create a 60m euro ($82m; £52m) fund to help French media organisations improve their internet operations. It follows two months of negotiations after local news sites had demanded payment for the privilege of letting the search giant display their links. The French government had threatened to tax the revenue Google made from posting ads alongside the results."
Re:robots.txt (Score:0, Interesting)
Crap argument. robots.txt is not about permission to copy and republish, but about permission to crawl and index.
As for hurr Google should just have stopped showing them in search results!" responses, why would Google want to devalue their product instead of simply understanding that [i]it takes effort to produce content and it's obnoxious to make profit by doing little more than taking another person's work[/i]?
Modern America has a price for everything and the value of nothing. It is an increasingly bland service economy which worries more about bandwidth and storage space than the creativity and knowledge which are actually stored and transmitted.