German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets 95
itwbennett writes German publishers said they are bowing to Google's market power, and will allow the search engine to show news snippets in search results free of charge — at least for the time being. The decision is a step in an ongoing legal dispute between the publishers and Google in which, predictably, publishers are trying to get compensation from the search engine for republishing parts of their content and Google isn't interested in sharing revenue. The move follows a Google decision earlier this month — and which was to go into effect today — to stop using news snippets and thumbnails for some well-known German news sites.
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All it took was to give them what they asked for (Score:5, Interesting)
They wanted Google to give them revenue or stop using their articles. So Google said, fine we will stop using your articles, good luck when you lose 65% of your daily hits since we know they come through us...
And three weeks to think it over. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google stopped displaying snippets and thumbnails Oct 1.. German Publishers relent Oct 23..
Now let that be another lesson for the history books..
Re:And three weeks to think it over. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's no different than the last publisher that went and got a court order forbidding Google from displaying any of their content (not realizing what that meant). A week after Google pulled everything from the index and their traffic had dropped of 95% they called up Google and offered to cut a deal (which I highly doubt Google paid a dime for).
Personally I think Google should just take a hard line in these states like Germany and require a signed document authorizing their use in perpetuity or they yank the entire site from all their indexes. If they did it to the entire German industry all at once I doubt the state could claim it was an anti-trust violation because they would be treating everyone equally.
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That would be overreaching, since Google now has actual competition. Trying to apply pressure too widely would drive industries to use and endorse Bing instead.
(I don't think "anti-trust violation" means what you think it means, by the way.)
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I'm using anti-trust in the context of how it was used in the article referenced in the summary which you didn't read. Yes the context is screwy cause I changed the tense and should have phrased it differently but if you want to play grammar nazi go play it elsewhere.
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However to Google the indexed sites aren't customers. People using the search aren't customers. Advertisers are Google's only customers and everyone else is product.
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That law puts them in an impossible position. It's either pay up or don't include them in search results, and if you use the "dominant player" provision that says they aren't allowed to delist them, then their only option is to basically be forced to pay anybody who asks, which would include content farms that most people regard as useless. That would be just asking for spam of course.
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Re:And three weeks to think it over. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if I'd call bing competition. All the computers at work are stuck with IE as the web browser, no other option. Every one of those had bing as default. I can't find a single one that hasn't been switched to Google. I know one guy who couldn't figure out how to switch it so he had to suffer with bing for a week until he got someone to show him how to change it. bing doesn't suck, it swallows.
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I kinda doubt that. I honestly really truly believe a lot of Bing's search traffic is fake. What ever makes me say that? Well, search either engine for 'bing rewards bot' to find out.
Basically, a lot of people get roughly $47 a month per IP address worth of amazon gift cards just by running a bing bot. If you have a lot of IP addresses, you can get a fair bit of Amazon gift card credit every month for basically doing nothing.
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Re:All it took was to give them what they asked fo (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are lot's of free options. Hardly anyone uses them but they're available and free.
I believe the actual concern is... (Score:2)
I believe the actual concern is that with a long enough snippet, people lose interest, and instead of driving traffic to the web site, you actually detract from the traffic that gets sent to the site.
This was a concern for U.S. newspapers as well, a few years back, but given that most of their content is syndicated off the AP newswire, or by United Press International, or by Reuters, or some other wire service, there's very little left of value in a paper that's failing to do journalism, and therefore isn't
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Newspaper articles are written so that all the most important information is set right at the beginning. That makes them faster and easier to read, especially if you want to skim through a lot of news. So yes, a snippet of the first paragraph or two most likely does contain most of the important information, because it's written with the readers in mind, not the advertisers or google bots.
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Newspaper articles are written so that all the most important information is set right at the beginning. That makes them faster and easier to read, especially if you want to skim through a lot of news. So yes, a snippet of the first paragraph or two most likely does contain most of the important information, because it's written with the readers in mind, not the advertisers or google bots.
In response to news index sites using leading snippets, this inverted pyramid [wikipedia.org] article structure will increasingly give way to click-bait openings.
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Reuters Shooter Dead At Marysville Pilchuck High School: Report (UPDATED) A shooting was reported in the cafeteria of Marysville Pilchuck High School in Marysville, Washington, at about 10:45 a.m., Friday.
That's the story?
December 7, 1941
Dateline Pearl Harbor
Japanese planes, explosions, morning.
Free aggregation? A problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free aggregation? A problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
They didn't think it was bad. That's evident based on this story.
They wanted Googles money and tried to exploit outdated laws written 100yrs ago to modern technology to try and extort that money. You know, like what every other media organization that's currently dieing because of the internet is trying to do.
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It's even more ridiculous than that: the relevant law is not 100 years old. It went just into effect this year thanks to a massive lobby effort by the media.
The new law is called "Leistungsschutzrecht" (law to protect the power) and has been titulated by it's many critics as a "lex google".
As is evident by this outcome, the whole thing backfired.
Too bad the law has now the exact opposite effect as intended: it prevents small bloggers from citating news and allows the big google to work as before.
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The publishers base part of their claim on a German online copyright law that came into effect last August, which gave publishers the exclusive right to the commercial use of their content and parts thereof, except in the case of single words or small text snippets.
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The laws are not outdated. They allow papers to make money off their work. Google showing your slashdot comment or other non-professional content without permission is okay as you're gaining any income from your comment nor is it capable of generating much revenue.
There is a big difference between amateur and professional content. Google should try to reach an agreement with the
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Google agreed to drop the articles. That's certainly fair. Somehow the newspapers didn't think so though. Why? Because they need Google more than Google needs them. Evidently they need that Google traffic so they must make money off it after all.
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Well, they're still mulling how to make money off google news. Remember, google search and facebook also did not make any money for years after they were released. So, google news is not a non-profit, nor a charity.
This is the heart of the matter... do you read every single article associated with a snippet you read? I highly doub
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You pretend that Google displaying more than the headline and the link would keep people away from visiting the news site.
That is just outright wrong.
1. If Google didn't display the link at all, there would be no people to not visit this link.
2. The newspapers themselves often put the most essential bit of information in the headline.
3. Google sends MILLIONS of visitors per month to the newspapers.Even if it was true that displaying some of the content would stop some people from following the link, the net
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A Google news link has the same format as a slashdot story link. Google news shows the title of the story and a small snippet copied from a copyrighted article. Are you telling me there are no slashdotters who went to the comment section without RTFA? There are plenty, and so your statement is completely false. Google news snippets can and will prevent newspapers from getting the page hi
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there's a nice little bit of technology available for quite some time right now. Actually two pieces of technology. One is called robots.txt in which you can tell globally not to index (or follow) links in a directory of your page. The other is to add a meta tag to your web site (META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX")
I'm quite sure google follows at least one of these quasi-standards. Both are quite old, the meta-tag one is from 1996 or so, IIRC.
But hey, why tell someone not to index your site when you actua
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Actually, the papers lobbied hard for the law and got it. Then they held up the law and made their demand. Google replied, "your wish is my command". Then the papers collectively said "EEEEEEEKK!, er, uh, could we go back to the way it was before?". Google kindly obliged.
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
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That's why they gave in. They knew that showing up on Google's search results with a small text sample is very big in traffic to their web sites. However, they wanted to exploit some legal triviality to demand that Google pay them for the privilege of increasing public awareness of their articles.
Google made the only intelligent choice when faced with such idiotic demands, and the Germans involved made the only not-entirely-suicidal choice when faced with Google's decision.
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Because they myopically stop thinking at "Google steals our content, grar!"
On a somewhat more excusable level, they just haven't yet come to terms with how people read news today. People (under 60) don't casually read the whole newspaper over breakfast anymore; they go to a news aggregation site and skim the headlines. When they find something of interest, they click through to read more
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It may be difficult to build a positive reputation under these circumstances, but it's not hard to build a negative one.
When looking through Google news, I actively avoid FOX news for example, because they crash my browser.
I use to consider the Christian Science Monitor somewhat respectable despite the name, until they started with bait-and-switch paywalled articles. Now I avoid them too.
So, reputation still matters. All you have to do is don't fuck it up like these assclowns did.
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You lost me when you said something about there being books in Texas...
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And he didn't even miss you.....
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Personally a snippet makes me click it (Score:2)
No, wait, do-over! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sad. I get so sick of people griping about the effects of Amazon and Google (etc), without giving a second thought to just how much they already get in return for the relationship. Same idea goes for Amazon and Hachette - They have every right to refuse to sell at the price Amazon wants; they'll just never sell another eBook.
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The Amazon-Hachette deal is a completely different situation. Amazon is using its market power to strong-arm Hachette into providing lower prices to Amazon than Hachette offers to other resellers. This is a classic case of collusion, and should be stopped on anti-trust grounds.
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You're accusing Amazon of colluding with.... Amazon? That word doesn't mean what you think it means.
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As I said - Rational thought just seems to hit a brick wall when you mention the likes of Amazon and Google. Free advertising becomes stealing (free) content; one-on-one vendor negotiation becomes collusion.
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Amazon is trying to lower prices, Apple was trying to raise them. The difference between them is what makes the difference between market collusion and frugal negotiating.
Apple caused ebook prices to go up between 30-100% across the entire industry. Amazon is trying to force prices lower so they sell more, apparently while trying to convince the publisher that lower prices can mean more revenue for everyone. There is a significant difference between the two actions, if you can't see that because your blind
Re:No, wait, do-over! (Score:4, Informative)
There certainly is an anti-trust issue here, but it's on the Hatchette side, not the Amazon side:
E-book price fixing settlements rolling out [usatoday.com]
Hatchette is now trying to reinstate the price-fixing it just got fined $69 million over via other avenues. And of course all the usual idiots are falling for the "Ooo, Amazon evil!" propaganda because Hatchette is the publisher for a lot of high power media personality who can go on TV and pretend this is all about "the little guy" rather than padding thier own pockets.
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Both situations involve a company providing a distribution channel for third party content creators. Both situations involve those third parties thinking they have an unconditional "right" to access that channel. Both situations involve those third parties pissing and moaning over the owner of that channel not actually caring in the least about the loss of any particular group of content producers.
I'll admit that
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No. Amazon simply said 'We don't sell ebooks at those prices, so lower or go elsewhere.' There was no attempt to prevent Hachette from going to other resellers.
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You'll feel relieved, then, to know that modern atypical antipsychotics work much better, and with far fewer side effects, than the old-school phenothiazines.
Of course Google gets something out of the relationship. Google exists to make money. They don't, however, sell news. They don't sell content. They sell us. And in that regard, Google really doesn't care in the least if the newspapers decide to play ball or give up the single best
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Glad they're working for you.
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When it's free, it's okay, but... (Score:2)
Just waiting for things to go 180deg...
If some companies get benefit from free advertising by google, perhaps they'll get even more benefit if they greased it with a little bit of payola [wikipedia.org]... You know, kinda how yelp does things... ;^)
Right to be forgotten (Score:2)
Minor problem (Score:2)
The law they had their cronies enact is still on the books. It's only Google that no longer has to give a shit about it, but it's still there to threaten innovation.
German IP is very restrictive (Score:5, Insightful)
We're talking about a country where you can't even rent out DVDs you own, unless you have an official licensed rental copy. This is where GEMA (their RIAA) priced Youtube out of the market per play. This is a country that supports making art owners pay artists a residual on art they own upon sale/auction (imagine you had to pay bricklayers or carpenters like this when selling a house). Similiar to england, you also have to pay taxes on every radio you own, every monitor (as it can be used as a TV, in theory).
Used to be that you had to have a monitor and was a quasi voluntary tax you could avoid saying you didn't have any of that (but the harassment was not worth it), as of 2013, every household has to be 18 euro /month ($22.75) regardless of TV or radio usage. We're talking about over $7.5B a year for truly shitty programming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
Germany rose up in the 19th Century as an industrial power very quickly because they had cheap books, people could own an entire bookshelf's worth for a fraction of what it cost in England. A lot looser IP or even for some time, no IP. Now copyright holders and entrenched interest strangle everything.
Despite having a decent software industry, Germany is having a tough time keeping up with the internet. Nearly all the good ideas are implemented first in America and elsewhere, and then come to them. If the legislators allow it. The entrenched interests fight awfully hard.
They are certainly losing out to feed old and dying interests.
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PBS is great. I used to love watching "This old house" and "New Yankee workshop" and "Victory Garden" and a lot of cooking shows and some of the BBC stuff. I had rabbit ears on my TV set and picked up 5 channels which was 4 too many. Now I have DirectTV with hundreds of channels and all I watch is History and Discovery Channels and.......PBS.
Germany's Odd Software Industry for non-Germans (Score:2)
Pyrrhic victory (Score:2)
Am I the only one in welcoming this outcome, because loathing strong-arm monopolies, err... monopolies period...?
Maybe.... (Score:2)
So, maybe losing all your content visibility on Google was worse than them publishing a small article headline?
So, maybe, just maybe, Google's exposure was actually to your advantage?
So maybe you've been biting the hand that feeds you?
If the threat of Google doing EXACTLY what you ask for (taking your content off their site) is enough to make you back down, maybe your original intention was something other than was stated?
Maybe you just wanted a free payment?
And maybe Google weren't being so evil in the fir