By Team Register for The Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
The Associated Press reports that Francisco Pinto Balsemao told
a conference in Brussels that Google and others were attempting to
reverse the traditional “permission-based” copyright model.
Warming to his theme, he said it was “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 revenues off the back of other
people’s content.”
While Balsemao slated Google and the like, he accepted that
consumers too had to be weaned off free content, so that the
publishing industry could “legal certainty and the confidence that
their intellectual property will be protected.”
The EPC’s membership is a who’s who of Europe’s traditional
media, with the heads of the Financial Times Group, Reuters,
Trinity Mirror, Telegraph Group, Daily Mail and General Trust, News
International UK and Reed Business Information amongst its UK
membership.
Google will, on request, remove a news source from its index.
Getting it to be more accommodating to the publishing industry’s
needs might need more concerted action from publishers.
And therein lies the problem. Before they could settle this new
feud with Google, the publishers would have to settle a range of
far more ancient feuds amongst themselves first.
© The Register
2005
