European publishers warned Tuesday that they cannot keep allowing Internet search engines such as Google Inc. to make money from their content. "The new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years," said Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, in prepared remarks for a speech at a Brussels conference.
His stance backs French news agency AFP, which is suing Google for pulling together photos and story excerpts from thousands of news Web sites. "It is fascinating to see how these companies 'help themselves' to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people's content," he said. "This is unlikely to be sustainable for publishers in the longer term."
Have you seen Google's news site? Take a look. It's not ripping anybody off. It's providing links that drive traffic to other news sites. If you smelly French bastards weren't so anti-capitalist, you might realize that web traffic can bring ad revenue. Google is doing you a favor! If you don't want people reading your news, hide it behind a subscription password like TimesSelect, and then no one will ever read it again!
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