It really does annoy me when people sue search engines and aggregators for copyright infringement, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It’s hardly as if they are getting a free ride, I don’t want to even think about the many millions it costs to keep the Google servers going. Fact is, they provide an essential service and make the internet a much easier place to navigate.

Google in Tussle for Digital Rights

In early September, a Belgian court ruled that the search giant could not reproduce certain copyrighted titles and summaries on its Belgian Google News or Google.be Web site, throwing into question the entire concept of online news aggregation, and even search indexing… No question, portals and search engines funnel huge amounts of traffic to editorial Web sites. But there’s growing concern among publishers that they’re getting eyeballs but little or no revenue from news aggregators. At worst, their material is being expropriated and reproduced outright, with no return whatsoever to the copyright owner.

Maybe these publishers are jumping the gun a little soon, products such as Feedvertising (Text Link Ads) are now starting to provide the opportunity to monetise RSS feeds. Though it is depressing to think there are even more places for advertising to creep.

Not that I’m necessarily a huge fan of Google, I think you always have to be wary when a company is that big and powerful, however good its original start up philosophies might have been. There are a couple interesting posts on ZDNet (Google speak on copyright: content owners beware and Google: Web friend or Web foe) following on the above Belgian case and Google’s blogpost “Our Approach To Content”.

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