| But this isn't about copyright, or those snippets. In fact the hypocrisy stinks. Newspapers are news scavenging machines. They regularly copy entire stories from each other, with journalist changing just a few words to get around copyright issues. Surely you've noticed? Every newspaper covers the mostly same stories, with the same facts. The reason it didn't matter is this isn't about copyright, linking, fairness or any other the other smoke stories you hear. The newspapers had a wonderful business model: they sold ads on dead trees. To entice people to buy their ads laden dead trees, they added news as bait. It's common knowledge in the newspaper the amount of "copy" you have to carry is determined purely by the number of ads you sold - you had to dilute the ad / news ration down to a palatable level. The people they could sell these ads on dead trees to was limited to roughly how far you could transport those dead trees after they came off the press (at midnight or so) so people could read them over breakfast. Maybe 100km at best? If someone started moving on that territory it was open warfare, but if they just copied your stories so they could sell ads to people outside of you territory - who cared? Rampant copying is how they collectively kept costs down. Now the internet has moved in, and nobody looks at ads printed on dead trees any more. The newspapers business model has gone. That would be true whether Google was the 1000 pound gorilla on the internet or there was no Google like company. Moving the 100's (1000's?) of mastheads that thrived because of the 100km dead tree transport limit was always going to result in a blood bath that would leave just a couple standing. We are nowhere near that yet. In the end this is about the internet taking their ad revenue. And that's not because of Google - it's because where before it was read the newspaper on the train or nothing, now you've got a while internet to browse, and most people don't choose to look at news sites, so they lost their audience. In particular it's got nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, linking or fairness, which is why apparently the legislation says Google has to hand over their ad revenue to the newspapers whether they link to them or not. |