Google Accused of Stealing Newspaper Content

The World Association of Newspapers is coordinating a campaign to demand compensation from Google and other search engines for unfairly exploiting newspaper, magazine, and book publishers’s content, according to the Financial Times. The group of publishers involved includes the International Publishers Association, the European Federation of Magazine Publishers, and Agence France Presse. They hope to meet with Charlie McCreevy, the European Union’s internal market commissioner, and Viviane Reding, commissioner responsible for media, to look at new standards and policies that could be drafted or even to seek possible legal action to enforce copyright laws.

The groups claim that, because when services such as Google News link to a news source they include the headline and one paragraph of the story, browsers often find that paragraph to be enough, and they don’t click through to the actual story.

Google, specifically, is being targeted because other search engines such as Yahoo and Ask Jeeves seem more open to “constructive dialog,” said Gavin O’Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers. He is quoted as saying, “It’s only Google which seems to have this absolute view [that all information should be available for free].” He said that search engines are building their businesses on the back of kleptomania.