Copyright laws are very clear. At the moment google copies content from other websites and publishes it on their own site, the result is pretty obvious.
It is very simple Google says very clearly that if you have a proper robots.txt file what you have blocked will not be indexed by the spiders. So following that if the daily telegraph had used a proper robots file then their content would not be showing up on Google news.
Why should companies have to go out of their way to 'opt-out'? You can't just thieve information and tell people they can chose to opt-out by 'doing this'. Pete
and that was they want to explore? although google do no harm but to drive traffic into their website. and they ignore using robot.txt? it was obvious it was all about the money. they want settlement. but i also appreciate this kind of issue specially an outcome of this issue.
As GADOOD said, why should they have to make an opt out? Lets say, with the power of the internet, you can have 1000's of sites like google news. Why do they have to bulk up there robots.txt for? And to the others who said, additional traffic, so?! did you not read my post, advertisers wont pay for US or International traffic ONLY UK traffic! The point is, the paper targets a niche market and only wants thoes people, eg, uk, upper class, middle management. Not every tom dick and harry that google news can direct to them, is in that niche. And yes it may seem backwards, but its their business model that has worked for decades, and the niche they target will always buy a physical paper. Why? Because something on the net has to be printed, they cant take the paper over to one of their buddies and say, hey did you see this! And so why do they have a website? Because they want to still be able to tap into an audience within that niche market, its a cometitive edge over there competors. I buy X, but i see on the telegraph website the news is more to my style and more accurate, must buy their paper in the future. Now, you have some guy, somewhere the telegraph isnt sold, is he going to buy the paper? No hes not, as such that reader has cost the telegraph money. Pierce
because before them there was so called search engines. an information retrieval system in relevance to search keywords. because they enter an internet world they should be aware of it. web standards are made not to ignore it.
Google News does not republish articles rather simply links to articles with very BRIEF descriptions. Add to this the fact that Google respects instructions in the robots.txt file and in meta tags AND doesn't put any advertising on the Google News webpages, it is really hard to claim copyright infringement as Google has a pretty solid fair use defense. Basically the Daily Telegraph needs to be laughed out of court.
Those brief descriptions are copied. Google copies and publishes on its own site. From the little info we have at the moment, it has nothing to do with google search and the robots.txt file. If a case is brought forward it will probably be about google news.
From what I've seen the snippets Google displays would be allowed by fair use under US copyright law. No idea what the UK fair use situation is, though. More importantly, do they really think they'll get more subscribers, make more money, and keep their advertisers happy by shutting off such a huge traffic source? Just because they're not on Google News isn't suddenly going to fix their subscription problem. The real problem is they're a newspaper - and that they're apparently too clueless to turn a profit on all the free traffic Google sends them. If I ever start complaining about Google sending me too much traffic I think it'll be time to get out of the web business.
Even google News obeys the robots.txt file so if they had a proper robots file then their article would not show up on google News but wait a minute if they dont show up on google news then gee wouldnt that hurt their subscriptions I would assume that a few people have joind their service because of google news .
So they get a few thousand hits and make an extra 7.92 each day. It meaningless to them. They do not make their money from adsense but from content syndication, advertising and paper sales. I'm sure they would like to have their work protected just like any writer, photographer, website designer etc. If it is upheld it could set a precedent. Maybe G will not have to show actual links to your sites at all in the future just your content with their ads.
The issue in law is different from the issue in a business sense, so I agree with what you said. Google has already lost a related case against newspaper sites, so in legal terms google broke the law. However, I can't see how the newspaper sites benefit from not being linked or cached by google. Maybe for very niche/premium sites that don't rely on mass search engine traffic for revenue, instead charging a fee for access. Its not really about search engines Vs newspapers, these are individual cases with specific details.
And copyright law does allow for the use of short snips of articles under fair use doctrine. A very good primer on fair use is at: http://chillingeffects.org/fairuse/faq.cgi While the primer is based on U.S. copyright law, most countries have normalized their copyright laws to be very similar and include some form of fair use doctrine. Actually yes it does have something to do with the robots.txt file as Google News is simply an extension of Google Search. If one wants out of Google News, they can block Google via the robots.txt. And unless the judge/jury is completely ignorant of how the Internet works and Fair Use it would fail.
KLB, how long is a piece of string? A "short" snippit, would could be 1000 pages, if the original article was 1,000,000 pages long.... And does fair use, cover the right to build an entire product on other peoples snippits? I think that would be streching it a bit too far... You people dont understand the idea of how a news paper works with advertising. Lets make an example. I am an advertiser, and I wish to sell "dedicated servers". I have a choice between newspaper x or y. X is a paper with 20,000,000 daily readers Y is a paper with 1,000,000 daily readers Cost of advertising is relative, whatever it is for y, its 20 times more for x. Right, to get the most sales, with only these facts, it would make sense to go with paper X. BUT, paper X is a tabloid and a very small minority would be interested in buying dedicated servers. Now, paper Y is a paper marketed to a specific niche of people who are mostly middle management. So in essance to get more sales, would not to be to go with the bigger market but the smaller niche market as your a lot more likely to sell something. Now take this to google news, google news doesnt divide people like this, it directs anybody and everybody, to what it believes is most relivant. This is why the daily telegraph doesnt want the traffic. As for having to put your site into robots.txt to say "dont touch my site", why didnt google make it, oh we will only crawl thoes sites that INVITE it to crawl it? Simple, not many of the major publishers would do it. Something like this would suffice(whatever the crawler name being): User-agent: Google-news-crawler Disallow: Code (markup): Let me give you another example, your depressed, and your talking about committing suicide.. I go over and put a bullet in your head. When Im standing up in court, i say "well judge, i assumed he wanted to die", that just isnt going to fly in any court, and just because you dont go through the administrative bother of adding a dissallow shouldnt give google a god given right to crawl your site, for google to build a commercial product on your hard work. The last point I want to make, is that papers are extremly political and the editors have the power to paint any company in any light including google. This could be a publicity stunt by them to sell more papers. Pierce
Wasn't there some European case recently where a scandanavian company (don't quote me on this) brought Google to court for indexing (not the news service but the search engine) their site even thought they didn't want it indexed? They won too. Court ordered Google to remove all references to it. About 2 months ago. I'l go see can i dig up the story (might just search Google news for it lol)!
i dont understand one thing. If google news aggregates their data through their RSS, i am sure there could be a way to block Google bot from reading it. Isnt that simple enough. rather than whining about something stupid.
Sure, but why should they make a change to stop something, when google could by default not index them till its invited?
if that's the case, googlebot will only index by invitation. There will be millions of people sending invitation to googlebot to come and index their website. The only way that makes sense is to block googlebot from your robot.txt..is that some big deal?
Very interesting --its to be seen how far the Daily Telegraph goes with it. I wonder if it would really pursue the threatening seriously.