IP Democracy: European Publishers to Google: No More Free Content

A group of European publishers warned Google today that the search engine giant better not get used to receiving their content at no cost, according to this AP piece. Francisco Pinto Balsemao, the head of the European Publishers Council, gave a speech in Brussels saying “[t]he new models of Google and others reverse the traditional permission-based copyright model of content trading that we have built up over the years.”

Balsemao also said

“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.”

The big beef European publishers seem to have with Google is Google News, which, ironically, doesn’t sell advertising. Agence France Presse has sued Google for including its articles and images in Google News.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on December 6, 2005 6:28 PM to IP Democracy