Murdochs said in a recent article

“Murdoch also addressed concerns among newspaper publishers that search engines like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc help users to find stories by aggregating links to newspapers websites and blogs -- but then wrest ad dollars from them that they think should be theirs.

"The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright... not steal, but take," said Murdoch. "Not just them but Yahoo."

"What Google News does, is give free publicity to the newspapers, by sending zillions of customers directly to the newspaper site.
It's exactly the same as if a new TV channel were set up, which did nothing but broadcast nonstop advertisements for all the TV shows on OTHER channels. Any NON-MONOPOLISTIC TV station owner would love for someone to do that for him.

NON-MONOPOLISTIC. That's the kicker. Murdoch obtains profits by pushing competitive views off the newsstands by his newspaper monopoly. Google restores the level playing field by letting people see all those NON-Murdoch news sources, as well as the Murdoch ones.

That's why blocking Google from indexing Murdoch properties doesn't serve Murdoch's desires. What he WANTS is for Google to stop indexing NON-Murdoch properties, so he can return to the monopolistic power he enjoyed.

This attitude has driven most of the big-media attacks on Google: not only newspaper, but book publishers, Movie moguls, and Music Industries Goons feel extremely threatened -- not by Google stealing content (it doesn't), not by Google promoting their own content (it does WHICH IS GOOD FOR THEM) but by Google promoting content from other sources, thus allowing those other sources free access to promotion (thus allowing the "little guys" to evade the monopolistic lock in distribution channels owned by the pigopolists.

Publishing ANYTHING for the purpose of promoting something IS an advertisement. Snippets are the ideal advertisement, as book publishers know. (That's why they publish multipage snippets of an author's next book in the back of the current printing of his last book.)
Snippets are fair use (by U.S. law). They do not substitute for the original, they are intended to promote the original and they do have that effect.

And it is not the publishers who have "gathered at great cost" the snippets. The publishers gathered (at whatever cost) the original article entire. It is Google who gathers, at great expense, articles of interest to surfers based on specified criteria--and promotes those articles to those surfers. There is no conceivable harm in this. The harm, I repeat, is that Google gives people alternatives and therefore bypasses the monopolistic distribution channels.

On your theory, Murdoch could prevent damages by taking his content off Google. He hasn't, and he won't, because THAT'S NOT HOW GOOGLE IS DAMAGING HIM. Google is damaging Murdoch by opening up promotional opportunities to Non-Murdoch news.

And that is not only perfectly legal, but of great public benefit. May they continue to profit as they deserve!

Labels: SEO copywriting

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