Google News is, at best, a news aggregation hub which only gives brief previews of news from many different publishers. However, certain people in France and Germany apparently want that Google must pay these publishers in question, and are trying to push legislation to that end.
Content aggregations websites, when they aggregate brief snippets of content from other places, are not infringing copyrights – neither are they making any direct use of the content. At best, they are serving the interest of the original content producers by routing more traffic to them.
That is precisely the case with Google News. Given Google’s immense audience, its news portal is at best sending out greater traffic to the content producers from whom it aggregates content. However, publishers and those who serve their interests seem to feeding off their greed far more than their common sense.
These people want laws which would force Google to pay the publishers for providing previews to their content on its News page. Ben Gomes, Google’s vice president for search, very rightly points out, “It’s bad for publishers in the long run. The concern is with laws like this, is it clamps down on what you can do, because it breaks the freedom of the Internet.”
Nonetheless, Gomes proposes that the publishers can make use of a lot of other means to make money off their content. They can, for instance, use Google AdSense or turn their magazines into apps and offer through Google Play. Of course, Google will also profit from either of these ways shall the publishers choose them.
Courtesy: CNET
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