“Make Google Pay” and Other Hallucinations
May 11, 2009 by Craig Stoltz
The news industry has generated much sympathetic publicity lately about the woes of the news industry.
First, let’s say this: It’s easy to get positive coverage for an issue when you control so many ways to getting the message out. Pity the poor clowns who need to grovel to get major media attention for groundwater pesticide contamination.
Anyway, as the news industry continues to fight the inevitable, one phrase keeps coming up again and again:
Make Google Pay
The idea is that Google’s search results pages link to news content that costs a great deal of money to produce. Google makes money by placing ads around those search results. The content producers should get some of that money, the content producers argue.
I am bewildered–and a bit ashamed–that anyone who has achieved even middling professional status in a line of work that attracts a lot of really smart people can even say the words “Make Google Pay” and believe they have validity.
“Make Google Pay” is not a strategy, it’s a consensual hallucination of desperate minds. It is cognitive spatter that results from overwhelming stress. It is HAL’s final, dirge-like notes of “Daisy.”
I don’t want to get into a full-blown discussion about changing news ecology, user behavior, content abundance, link journalism, anti-trust law, etc.
I will make just three points. They seem so obvious to me that they don’t even need to be said. But as demonstrated at last week’s Congressional hearings about the future of journalism, people in the news industry, their lackeys and retainers appear not to have heard them. So:
1. Google is linking to content, not publishing it. I am amazed at how often Google is said to be “publishing” others’ news. Google points people to content that its algorithms determine to be high-value. Linking is not republishing. It is not a copyright violation. It is a way to direct people to high-value content that appears on the creators’ sites. The fact that Google is shrewd enough to extract value from its sift-and-direct service does not constitute unfair trade or thievery.
2. Publishers can block Google any time they want. If they think Google is extracting value from their content unfairly, they may choose to make their results invisible immediately. Any junior member of a news site’s web team can do this by 2 p.m. today.
3. Publishers instead are trying to make Google function as their utility. This is an astonishing act of delusional bravado. To wit: “Our content is so valuable that you must direct people to us and pay for the privilege.” Plus: “We need an anti-trust exemption to make this work, but our work is so important we deserve it.” This is not a business proposition, it is confiscatory collusion. I am stunned that various personages at the recent hearings entertained this proposal as if it were a serious idea worth consideration.
For god’s sake: “Make Google Pay” is a dead-end, an intellectually bankrupt proposition from a group of businesses that blew their big chance and continue to blow it every time they gather.
Trying to re-shape Google’s business to the demands of a failing method of distribution is a fool’s errand. If not precisely evil, it is at least destructively self-interested.
Every intercranial electrical firing, every synaptic twitch that news leaders devote to Make Google Pay represents a withdrawal from the central challenge they face: Creating bankable value that will fund the portion of their journalistic work that truly matters to democracy.
===================
nb: Do a Google search using the words
Congressional hearings on future of newspapers
The pages that appear include no advertising. I mean, what are the chances?
What’s really funny about that Google search? Only 1 of first 10 results is from a …wait for it… newspaper!
The question of whether what Google does is copyright violation is hardly a clear and obvious issue. Fair use is allowed under US copyright statutes, but puts qualitative limits. For example, the user cannot take the commercial value out of the piece. A simple word count doesn’t do; there’s a famous copyright case in which one book author successfully sued another for use of a pair of two-word phrases the former had devised.
Google does not just link. It takes the headline and at least the first line and makes them available. That is publishing at least part of the story. It is also showing images. The interesting consideration is whether it is for commercial use or not. From what I’ve been able to tell, Google isn’t running ads against its News site. It makes me wonder if this is a safety move to claim that it’s a noncommercial use. But it’s not a slam dunk that Google would win in a court case.
Erik–Thanks for your thoughtful and well-informed comments.
You are correct that Google’s search results are often more than simple linking. Search results usually include portions of blurbs, many of these carefully crafted by publishers in order to get their content more visilbe on Google search results. And yes, images and embedded videos are now showing up on news results pages.
But let’s take this line of reasoning–that linking as practiced by Google is a violation of copyright because it diminishes the value of the underlying content asset–far forward.
So courts determine that search engines have no right to link to content [because even excerpting the headline is a violation of fair use, by virtue of its diminishing the value of the underlying asset].
And lets says the courts decide, consistent with this thinking, that Google does not have the default right to search anything. Google must get permission to index a site owner’s content. This would likely be done with a snippet of code or, on some publishing platforms, a radio button.
Of course most alert content producers would quickly include the Google code snippet. Certainly all the commercial operations that want to draw users to their content. Blog platforms would make allow content creators to do this fairly easily.
Conversely, mainstream publishers convinced that links on search engine results pages erodes their content’s value would simply not do anything to their content, thus screening it from Google’s spiders.
How about those who lack the wherewithal to cut and paste a snippet of code or know where to find the opt-in button, with its massive bedsheet of legalese and the “I Accept” checkbox? This would include indie publishers, whack crusaders, poets of all sorts, family geneologists, lonely academic geniuses, people with personal stories to tell the world, angry activists, your momma–would simply disappear from search results.
Indie, non-commercial publishers would now face an economic burden–a tax of sorts, in the form of a requirement to acquire the knowledge or assistance to make their sites Google-ready–in order to reach a global audience.
This shift of burden to indie publishers will have taken place in order to protect the economic interests of Big Serious Mainstream News Organizations.
I’d love to follow the politics, public opinion and legal maneuvering following that change.
And how will the titans of the news industry will stammer to sustain the argument that their multi-million-dollar, multi-year legal action has been undertaken in the name of public interest.
With apologies to Thomas Jefferson. I’m beginning to think that if given the choice between a world without mainstream news and a world without Google, I’d prefer the world without mainstream news.
Craig,
The problem with this argument is that you’re setting it on a number of assumptions that are not a given, and in some cases are a bit far-fetched.
First, you’re assuming that what Google does is “only” linking and not “republishing.” Before I made my comment, I went to Google News and started to click on some stories. In each case, Google has reproduced the host site’s headline and the first line or two of text. It also often used copies of images. Now, that’s not republishing much per story, but it is republishing a lot in aggregate.Most people skim most stories and are happy with a headline and maybe a first graph. That’s the economic value of that particular story for most of the audience. So Google might be taking the economic core of a story out with that first bit, or it might be taking out the economic core of the whole site by combining all these bits.
However, why assume that a court would say that Google has no right to link? It could say that Google would have to paraphrase everything, or maybe list a story and then links for all the publications that are carrying something on the topic. That wouldn’t require reproducing any copy, and Google might even be able to automate a paraphrasing engine to give the various angles each takes. It might even be that a US court would rule that Google could quote the headline, because “titles” do not enjoy copyright under US law, but I don’t know that any court has considered the issue of whether a headline is effectively a title.
A court might rule that a search engine could link if it could paraphrase what it was linking to. A court might rule that everything was fine as it is. There is no telling, which was part of my point. This is a thorny area of copyright law, as I understand it (not a lawyer), and so it’s uncertain what might happen. Then there is the issue of copyright in other countries, as Google has learned in Europe.
I doubt that a US court would say that Google couldn’t link to something - courts have been pretty set that linking is permissible. But to what degree could Google reproduce content? There’s no way to say. That is simply arguing the legalities. Your information doomsday scenario, if I can use that term (a bit flamboyant, I know) is almost completely unlikely, I would suspect. And, as I said, deciding that Google had no right to search web content would probably fail on both copyright and free speech grounds. So no need to worry about the independents and small presses, as they won’t have to include code snippets (although many of them already can and do for gathering usage metrics or including widgets).
The news industry still has to figure out how to survive, that is true. Can it? I don’t know. But I do know, from my own work in the area, that people who assume that everything will be picked up by interested volunteers don’t understand what it takes to create reported stories. A single 1,500 word magazine piece, even in a trade pub, is likely to take at least a dozen hours and possibly more. This is time-intensive work, and if you don’t have the information, the opinion rests on nothing. That’s the big problem.
[...] bullet—especially when Apple unleashes its rumored large-screen iPhone, aka the Kindle-killer. Punishing Google is not a magic bullet—indeed, it’s a short-sighted strategy that can devastate traffic and [...]
What’s really funny about that Google search? Only 1 of first 10 results is from a …wait for it… newspaper!