Publishers at war, journalists increasingly stripped of their rights. The RSS Feeds of Google News end up on aggregation sites that have only one purpose: to generate income at the expense of those who create, at the expense of those who invent, at the expense of those who live every day from content. But Google’s News guidelines are very clear: it is illegal.
A new serious question is circulating among industry insiders in the information world: is it legal for commercial sites (even the insertion of a single line of advertising makes the site commercial, in this regard court rulings are very clear) to republish news from Google? The answer is clear: the RSS feeds coming from Google News are illegal if used for commercial purposes, Google explicitly states this.
Copyright infringement
And if the RSS feeds from Google News are illegal it means that there is a violation by sites that aggregate news coming precisely from the most well-known news container in the world. After all, the publisher wants to be present in this container and certainly not on sites that have little to do (in most cases) with the news. In Italy, there is a copyright law and as such it must be respected and not interpreted. The damages for those who make a living from content every day are evident. The majority of renowned publishers worldwide have already raised the issue with Google regarding the reuse of content that is intellectual property of the author and commercial property of the publisher. Google initially responded that a publisher is free to enter Google News or not, but today it is reconsidering its policy somewhat. Meanwhile, the Antitrust authority is investigating. But this is not the latest issue, nor is it what is discussed here. Here we talk about sites that use Google News RSS feeds violating Google’s policy and, indirectly, also that of the publisher who chose to be on Google News and not on other commercial sites.
Publishers against copy-pasters and aggregators
“We survived the crisis of print publishing by investing on the web and contributing to its growth also through our work,” declares Raffaele Lopardo, CEO of FullPress Agency, publisher of digital magazines including FullPress.it. “We fight daily the scourge of professional copy-pasters who ‘steal’ and republish content daily for commercial use with advertising affiliate programs, disregarding the legitimate owners of the news, but we would never have thought of a web made of information 3.0 where everything is based on the aggregation of aggregation of aggregated and reaggregated content. A technologically manipulated information web in which content that was ‘the king’ has lost its value. If we continue like this the content of the new generation Web will be generated solely by user-generated software of web agencies that will make journalists and publishers disappear.”
Is this the Web that creates value?
In the era of Web 2.0, participatory journalism, information coming from the bottom, Internet does not need aggregators and algorithms. The sharing of knowledge does not pass through tricks and cunning schemes whose only goal is to earn money with the Web, as many more or less questionable books invite us to do, without going through sacrifice and especially professionalism, beyond respect for others and the work of others.
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