Legal Research

Please Sir, Google stole my content

By scott

I see in the Guardian that The German Federation of Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) have become the latest groups to jump on the ‘Google are stealing our content’ bandwagon and have complained to the Federal Cartel Office about Google including news article “snippets” in its search results without payment to the news sites in question.

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder where these people were when they had that meeting about ‘what the web is and what the internet is?’

If you don’t want search engines searching and indexing you stuff, put a bloody robots.txt file on your site and add the relevant domains to it ? problem solved. And, if you don’t want search engines searching your content, then what the fuck are you on the internet for in the first place?

I have to say my first question in any case like this would be ? so, do you have a robots.txt file in place to stop your content being ’stolen’ without your permission and you entering into a commercial agreement? If the answer is YES, then I take the case forward. If the answer is NO, I tell you to fuck off and to stop wasting my time.

So, what is it they object to exactly you ask? Well things like this ?

German News Groups, Microsoft Unit File Anti-Trust Complaints Against Google
paidContent.org - ?16 hours ago?
?The Federation of Newspaper Publishers (BDZV) and Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) have complained about that ‘ol chestnut - Google’s use of …

It is also curious how it always seems to be Google, not Microsoft or Yahoo that is the problem. Do Microsoft and Yahoo already pay German Federation of Newspaper Publisher and Association of German Magazine Publishers to include their members’ snippets in their search results/ news search results? I suspect not. Also, I believe I’m right in saying that Yahoo’s news service is by far the most popular and most used on the web, not Google’s, although this may be more about adwords revenue.

I fully appreciate the difficulties that the publishing industry is going through ? my girlfriend was a casualty of those problems last year and more friends of hers have lost their jobs in the past few weeks ? but these endless attempts by the industry to blame everybody else for their failings is getting tiresome. Without the likes of Google, the only people who’d be reading their content are those current readers who have been abandoning their traditional print versions, and how long do you think they’ll keep their business afloat? Here, let me hand you the nails for your own coffins.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 18, 2010 (boomark / email).