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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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A blow to edge content

Long before there was Edgeio, Google recognized the notion of content on the edge and the power of a website to aggregate content that already exists in other places.

Edgeio clarified the concept with its use of blog tags for classified ads. Rather than a seller listing an ad on a site like Craig’s List or eBay, he would simply run the item on his own blog and tag it in such a way that Edgeio could find it. Edgeio would list all the classifieds it had found, sucking those items in from the sites where they resided.

Google News has been doing roughly the same thing for years. The principle is the same: If news content resides on news sites, it should be a simple matter to aggregate that content and make it available in aggregate based on the interests of the reader.

Today, a Belgian court dealt a blow to Google News and perhaps to anybody thinking of aggregating content without explicit permission. The court was responding to a complaing filed by Copiepresse, which handles copyright issues for the German and Belgian-French press. The court ordered Google to stop reproducing articles from those publications in its Belgian sites.

Failure to coply will cost Google US $1.3 million per day.

News.com quoted Copiepresse General Secretary Margaret Boribon: “We are asking for Google to pay and seek our authorization to use our content??Google sells advertising and makes money on our content.”

Google does, indeed, make money with advertising on Google News, but seeing a full story requires readers to click through to the newspaper’s site. As you can see from the image below—of a Google News search on Copiepresse—only the first few words of the story appear, followed by the link to the media outlet’s site.

Shel Holtz

So Google is driving traffic to these newspapers, traffic from readers who would likely never find those newspapers to begin with. As my mother would put it, Copiepresse is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

But worse, many organizations thinking about how to offer services that leverage edge content may now think twice. That’s a shame.

09/18/06 | 4 Comments | A blow to edge content

Comments

  • 1.I think this will probably be of long term benefit.
    It will marginalise Belgian.
    It will cease to exist.
    People will now see it.
    It will be invisible.
    Who will know about this country?
    Belgian democracy will loose a voice.

    Good work Copiepresse

    David Phillips | September 2006 | United Kingdom

  • 2.David, your comment is a poem. Quite beautiful.

    I'm sure that Copiepresse never expected art, only bureaucracy, but there you go.

    Martyn Davies | September 2006 | UK

  • 3.The comment above made me think about this: http://zapatopi.net/belgium/

    On another note, this is one of the areas where Edgeio (disclaimer: I work for Edgeio) differs from search engines in general: We're opt-in rather than opt-out. It matters less for general search, but in our market it's essential: Companies selling a product or offering a service often want control over how that product is presented and where, as this ruling shows.

    Vidar Hokstad | September 2006 | London

  • 4.The Belgian's aren't the only ones doing this. Just look at all the sources that have stopped providing freely available news.

    For example, I scan the news for articles relating to my company and then send the link to employees each morning. Canada's National Post, meanwhile, switched to a subscriber-only format about a year ago.

    We bought a few subscriptions so that we could see what they had written but National Post has said that we need to buy a subscription for each employee if we want to send along their news (which would cost us upwards of $1M).

    We, therefore, haven't sent any traffic to them for about a year and have only been directing employees to their competitors (including the Globe and Mail which has added a blog-like comment feature to their articles).

    With the rise of blogs and their threat to traditional media, I fail to see the value in shutting out most of the remaining website traffic in favour of a few subscribers who probably already buy the paper copy.

    Brett Tremblay | October 2006 | Toronto, ON, Canada

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