Uncle Frank, is this a joke?

The case focused on Google’s news aggregation service, which
automatically scans the websites of newspapers, extracting headlines
and snippets of text from each story. These are displayed at Google
News and the headlines link users to the full stories on the source
sites. Newspaper group Copiepresse, which represents leading Belgian,
French and German publications, said this amounted to copyright
infringement and a breach of database rules because its members had not
been asked for permission.

Is Google legal? | The Register

Oh, come on. This whole "sue Google for just about anything" trend has gotten a bit crazy at this point. I mean, if I were an exec within the ranks of Copiepresse, I'd see Google's use of my newspapers' articles as great publicity and jump on the chance to generate extra advertising revenue from the new web site traffic. What kind of a company sues another for, really, publicizing it free of cost?

And even more laughable is this company's desire for permission to be asked before linking to one of their articles and offering a short teaser to draw in readers? Are they serious? Do they not understand how many trillions of times a day this happens to every newspaper article made available on the web and that trying to stop it can be likened to trying to stop the Earth from spinning? I mean, even the members-only news sites out there can be easily foiled.

My advice to Copiepresse is to stop being so utterly absurd and take advantage of this new traffic, finding ways to get even more traffic from the most-used search engine in the world.


Technorati Tags: copiepresse, google, newspaper, articles