Newspaper trade group calls search engines kleptomaniacs

By Michael Fraase

Wednesday, 01 February 2006 04:08PM CST

Section: Publishing

Google may not get it, but the publishing industry doesn’t even know that there’s something to get. The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) has launched a surely ill-fated public relations campaign to challenge the search engines. Search engines like Google, according to WAN managing director Ali Rahnema, are building a new medium “without fair compensation to copyright owners.”

By aggregating headlines, photos, and blurbs, the publishers’ trade group insists that the search engines are infringing their copyrights. “The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article, Rahnema told Reuters, “it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.”

But the best quote goes to Gavin O’Reilly, president of WAN: “We need search engines, and they do help consumers navigate an increasingly complicated medium, but they’re building [their business] on the back of kleptomania.” O’Reilly reinforced his characterization, telling the Financial Times, “I think newspapers have developed very compelling web portals and news channels but the fact here is that we’re dealing with basic theft.”

The irony of this is thick: publishers already have a technical mechanism (robots.txt) to prevent the search engines from spidering their content. If they feel they’re being infringed and don’t have a clue about the traffic to their websites that is driven by the search engines, they have the remedy at hand.

The fact here is that we’re dealing with basic cluelessness.

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