February 15, 2007 :: Lawsuit by EU News against Google

This article on the European Union lawsuit against Google makes some very important points.

Generally, websites are made of web pages or articles, and articles are meant to be read. To be able to read a website or article, a web user must be able to somehow find the page or article. This is where a user either browses a web site for its articles (such as a listing of articles like a chronological list or a collection of articles like a newspaper's "front page"), searches for articles (using a word or date searching function on the website that houses the articles -- "search articles"), or uses an indexing website like a news index or search engine. Google is such an indexing search engine.

For a website to make money, there are two main models that most sites follow: advertising and subscription. Advertising models usually involve showing the user commercial links which feeds money back to the listing website. Subscription modles usually involve either charging for access or as is typical in the news websites, charging for archived articles published some time ago, often over a week or so. Both models require web users to visit the site. The more web users to visit the site, the more money the web site will make. [ Having run several of these sites myself, I can assure you of the next fact's accuracy, even on a small scale ] From a marketing, planning, and budgeting standpoint, it is almost a mathmatical certainty that a certain percentage of web users will contribute to the revenue of the site in some way. This is almost a mathmatical certainty.

The central claim in this lawsuit against google was that it violated the news sites' copyrights by showing the news articles' title and first sentence when directing web users to the news sites' articles. The news sites, as plaintiffs, alleged that they desired (and currently desire) absolutely NO web traffic from google.

This makes no sense at all, as the more traffic they get from google, the more money they make. The article above makes the allegation that the only explanation for this lawsuit is that the european equivalent of google (as though it could possibly be anywhere as ubiquitous as google) is attempting to fill a void that can be created by a legally decreed absence of google in europe. Apparently, that may now be a possibility, as the news agencies succeeded in winning the lawsuit forcing google to cease listing their websites' articles in google's search results.

My personal favorite quote from the above article is this:

But since most news organizations actually request (or beg) that Google include them in the news-search function, [a string of similar lawsuits against Google] seems unlikely to happen -- and odd that this lawsuit took place in the first place. . . . If I was a shareholder in any of these publications, I would be asking the executives exactly why they want fewer readers and no links from Google. Is it some new business model?

These news sites are not secret sites espousing radical, terrorist plots or distributing illegal copies of software. These sites are in the business of selling news. Why don't they want people to find their product? This is extremely unusal.