Publishers to Google: back off

Publishers cannot continue to allow search engines to make money off of their content, the head of the European Publishers Council said in a speech in Brussels this week.

According to an Associated Press article, Francisco Pinto Balsemao backed French news agency AFP, which is suing Google for including its content on its news site.

"It is fascinating to see how these companies 'help themselves' to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people's content," he said.

Blog community response:

"What neither Brussells nor the AFP have grasped is that syndicated / aggregated / remixed content is not only part of the fabric of the online newsphere today (it is how I found about the story), but that this type of network-based content distribution is set to increase even more so over the next couple of years, especially as RSS hits the mainstream."
-- Alex Barnett blog

"News is not consumed through a search box. You cannot search for news because you wouldn't know what to search for. It's new. That's why there are products such as Google News, so you can see what is news."
--Silicon Valley Watcher

"Balsemao wants to make everything harder to find, and - even worse than Gorman - wants there to be a tollbooth in front of it all."
--Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants