Just as the rumor mill is warming up that Google execs are meeting in a cold dark room to decide which Googlers get the ax, the Associated Press and another 1,400 papers that make up the news network are taking aim at the way the Silicon Valley giant delivers news. And it could effect how you read the headlines.
On Monday William Dean Singleton, the head of the Associated Press and the chairman of the company that runs the Bay Area Newspaper Group, which owns the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News, said The AP will take legal action against aggregation sites. Translation: newspapers are going broke and they are blaming Google.
“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” Singleton said in a speech at The AP’s annual meeting in San Diego, according to our friends at The New York Times.
The AP also said it would launch a new system to track sites that link out to their network of articles without permission. And while, The New York Times, was quick to mention that The AP did not name Google by name, industry experts see the suit as a direct shot how the Googilization of the news.
Google News allows readers to create a news page based on the keywords they search. Google then builds a customized interface that will give readers a headline, one or two lines and then a link to the original source.
Singleton said he wants to challenge the fair use policy that allows users to cut and paste a small portion of copyrighted material with an original link back to the source.
The news source said it wants to work with sites who obtain permission to aggregate its material. Translation: The AP wants a piece of the ad revenue pie from aggregators.
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If The AP is successful in its case, it could change the way news is delivered on line from bloggers to Google News to The Drudge Report. What type of aggregators would we be if we didn't show love to The New York Times for breaking the story? Thank you NY Times. (While you're at their site, please click on a banner ad or two, so we can continue to aggregate their material. Thanks).
