In Germany politicians are considering a bill to extend copyright protection to excerpts of newspaper articles appearing in search engines’ results, thus enabling publishers to collect payment for them. Google is the main target: some German newspaper executives say it benefits from showcasing their material in search results on its news aggregator, Google News. A similar bill has been proposed in Italy. French newspapers want the same. On October 29th President François Hollande warned Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, that if French newspapers’ demands for compensation are not met by year-end, France may pass a law akin to the German one. Austrian and Swiss publishers are thinking along similar lines.
Giving away the headline and first sentence of an article supposedly dissuades readers from clicking through to the newspaper’s website to read the entire story.
Newspapers are also claiming that copyright law is on their side. America’s laws are more relaxed than most of Europe’s, so search engines’ use of some material from articles qualifies there as “fair use”. But in Belgium a group of newspapers sued Google for news copyright infringement and won. The company is appealing against the ruling but is likely to have to pay some damages.
The real issue behind all this, however, is the decline of traditional media. In France not a single national newspaper is profitable, despite around €1.2 billion ($1.54 billion) in direct and indirect government subsidies, according to Olivier Fleurot, the boss of MSLGROUP, a communications firm, and a former chief executive at the Financial Times, part-owner of The Economist. In 2011 newspaper advertising globally amounted to $76 billion, down 41% since 2007, according to the World Association of Newspapers. Only 2.2% of newspapers’ advertising revenues last year came from digital platforms, and even these are vulnerable to ad-blocking software.
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