An organisation of newspapers is howling with rage that its members are being featured on Google News.
The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) is to examine how they can assert their rights regarding copyright and compensation, and have threatened to take legal action over copyright infringement and brand enforcement.
At root, the WAN wants ‘fair compensation’ to copyright holders. It believes that the search engine is making money out of their content without paying any licence fee in return.
The WAN has set up a task force to examine whether a deal can be struck between themselves and the search engine and create a proper ‘commercial relationship’ between publishers and the search engines and content aggregators.
The WAN admits that Google News provides a ‘valuable service’ to publishers in terms of traffic generation but says that it has built its business models in large part on taking content for free. However, Google News has never run advertising alongside its results and makes no direct revenues from the service.
The group says it also plans to take its complaint to the European Commission.
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