Orginal Article is from collected information from CNET NEWS.com.
Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: January 31, 2006, 5:14 PM PST
The Internet has undercut the businesses of newspapers, book publishers and magazines for years and now these media are looking for ways to fight back. << It appears they already ahve rules in regulations in place to do so. >> Bold text is an insertion from us, while the normal text is CNET News.com's Report.
Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, collect headlines and photos for their users without compensating the publishers a cent, according to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), which announced Tuesday that it intends to "challenge the exploitation of content" by the Googles and MSNs of the Web.
The Paris-based group, which represents 18,000 newspapers, isn't discussing what action it may take. WAN executives said in a statement that they want to explore their options and added that they understand search engines help them in one way: aggregating content and packaging it for consumers. But WAN noted that Web companies also "built their business models in large part on taking content for free."
Agence France Presse has already filed suit against Google, alleging that Google News offers its photos and stories without permission. <>
The move by WAN comes against a backdrop of layoffs, falling profits and shrinking readership at the world's newspapers. Huge numbers of companies have shifted their advertising dollars over to the Net and polls show a growing number of consumers obtain their news from the Web. <Newsjungle RSS Reader to import the RSS feeds and filter news for me. This program is available at reader.newsjungle.com>>
On Tuesday, Knight Ridder reported a 22 percent drop in fourth-quarter profit from the same period a year ago. Deep-pocketed newspapers, such as The New York Times and Los Angeles Times have reduced staffing.
At the same time, the search engines have flourished. <>
"The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense," WAN President Gavin O'Reilly said in a statement.
To sum this one up, I believe this lawsuit is being brought on by a community who missed their chance to profit and have not put proper robots on there websites. Most of these people are not programmers or have kept up with technologies. If people like O'Reilly wanted to protect their system there are many ways to do it. Require login access to to stories, place robots.txt files in place to stop LEGIT Search engines from spidering their websites, and Hire Decent Technology specialists who could teach them how to prevent certain articles from being spidered, or even stolen. This organization should really see how News Jungle Reader is preparing there new Services! These Service types for News Agencies are state of the ART.
