Google News publishes headlines and snippets of text produced by
newspapers who allow it to use their material. Publishers can
easily stop Google from using material published on their newspaper
websites.
Publishers, though, have taken legal action against Google in
the past over the use of their news stories. The Italian Federation
of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG) told the New York Times that it
objected to a lack of transparency about how Google ranks stories
and items, preventing publishers from accurately honing their
content to win higher rankings and advertising revenue.
“Publishers provide much of the content on the Internet, but
they get nearly nothing for it,” FIEG president Carlo Malinconico
told the paper. “This is not fair, in our opinion. Our feeling is
we lose more than we gain.”
Google, though, has said that any publisher unhappy with being
included on Google News can easily opt out. "As we explained to the
FIEG when we met them earlier this year, Google News has over
25,000 sources from around the world," said a blog post published
by Google News product manager Josh Cohen. "All of these news
providers - like any website publisher - are in complete control
when it comes to whether they want to be found on Google
services."
"So if a news publisher doesn’t want to be found on Google.com,
Google.it or any other reputable search engines, it can prevent
indexation automatically via a universally accepted Internet
standard called robots.txt," said Cohen.
The FIEG told the New York Times that the price of withdrawing
was too high, that if newspapers took their material off Google
News they would also have to take it off Google's search engine, a
disastrous move for any organisation seeking casual internet
visitors.
Google said that this is not true. "One … option is for a
publisher to continue to appear in Google web search, but not in
Google News. In that case, all they need to do is contact us to be
removed. In fact, we met with several Italian publishers and
representatives of FIEG just this summer to explain these options,"
said Cohen.
"We respect the wishes of content owners, which is why we've
made it easy to opt out of our services. However, when it comes to
Google News, we have far more requests for inclusion than for
removal," he said.
Publishers in Belgium did win a legal case against Google over
its News service. Representative body Copiepresse won a case in
which it said that caches of its members' content broke copyright
law.
It later came to a deal with Google that allowed member material
to appear in Google searches but not in the News service.
Competition regulators visited Google Italy's offices last week
in connection with the claims, said reports.
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