REACTIVEradio

Today, a Belgian court ruled that Google must not reproduce extracts from a variety of Belgian newspapers, and an entire planet suffered.

I have a very serious problem with this ruling. While I don’t have a problem with groups like the RIAA or the MPAA going after pirates who are deliberating stealing whole albums or movies (well, yes I do, but that’s another story for another day), I do have a problem with companies essentially slapping Google in the face for free marketing.

The issue at hand is Google News, Google’s free news aggregating service. What this service does is scour thousands of different news sites on the internet, attempt to categorize them (this all done automatically, by the way), and display them in a single place, with an excerpt (usually the first sentence of the article) as well.

Once you click on the top link (e.g. “Google News Slapped by Belgian Court” in the above example), you are taken to the site where the article is hosted, where you can be slammed with as much advertising as the writer sees fit.

The problem that these newspapers are complaining about is that by Google News posting an excerpt of the news on their Google News homepage, Google is screening their advertising out and only showing you the story. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I am reading the news, one sentence is definitely not going to “fill me up” knowledge-wise. I am going to click on the link to find out more than just a very basic description of what happened, and in the process be subjected to the sites ads, just like they want.

They are claiming that people are just reading the headlines and they’re losing so much advertising revenue for it. Whine whine whine. My question to these publishers is this: if you think people are only reading the headlines of your stories, even if they did get them on your site rather than Google, do you honestly believe they’ll have enough time to see your advertisements?

All these companies have accomplished is that people like myself who do read the whole article will no longer be going to their sites, and not even have the change to be affected by the advertising they have implemented in their sites.

On second thought: good riddance.