“Aggregators and Google News are, to us, the worst offenders,” general counsel Lawrence Jacobs said today at a luncheon talk at Brooklyn Law School. “They make money by living off the sweat of our brow.”
The refrain is familiar by now, yet makes no more sense now than the last dozen or so times we’ve heard it. If Google News is such a menace, all News Corp. has to do is communicate that it no longer wants its stories indexed.
Jacobs acknowledged as much, but said that News Corp. isn’t willing to go that far. “No one, including us, is ready to pull that trigger,” he said.
MediaPost Publications News Corp.: Google News Lives Off ‘Sweat Of Our Brow’ 10/14/2009
Sawickipedia: Online content aggregators are the digital, modern equivalent of what broadcast radio stations are to the music business. Aggregators and radio stations clearly created value for the content creators and artists. What’s not clear is that value that the content creators were forced to give up to aggregators and radio stations via the lack of restricted rights.
Saying Google gives (ie. traffic) as good as it gets (default start page for web search and a $200-300B market cap) is worth debating.
At the same time I don’t know if there is a good financial mechanism for the aggregator to financially compensate the content creator. As the music biz shows when blanket licenses aren’t available, innovation stagnates and stumbles. So the debate and solution search continues.
