Technology has altered perceptions about freedom of speech to a great extent. The recent tussle between German newspapers and Google over the display of excerpts of news articles in Google News search results just goes to show how subjective the notion of ‘freedom of speech’ is.
Politicians in Germany are contemplating the extension of copyright laws to extracts of newspaper articles displayed in search engine results so that Google will be forced to pay newspapers for the few lines that appear. Italian and French newspapers are also following the lead of their German counterparts.
In October this year, 154 newspapers in Brazil also pulled out of Google news for the same reasons. “By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites,” Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto, President, Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers, was quoted by the BBC in October.
Google, meanwhile, argues that it drives about 4 billion clicks to news websites every month, and so, it already does help boost ad revenues for newspapers by increasing traffic on their sites. International media has cited Google as claiming that if it’s made to pay for the content displayed on news search, it could, ‘threaten its very existence’.
The changing scenario brings to light two aspects; firstly, will charging Google for the displayed lines go against the universal adage of ‘freedom of speech’ and secondly, the acceptance of the changing face of media from less print and newspapers to more digital coverage.
Views vary as to who’d be at the losing end if a copyright on the displayed text is imposed and Google removes newspaper sites of the concerned titles from its search results.
In the case of the Brazilian newspapers, traffic dropped by only five percent when they opted out of the search results on Google’s news page, though their results continue to be displayed in the main search engine.
On the other hand, lower traffic at news websites and lower ad revenues as a consequence cannot be ignored either.
Google’s Public Policy Director, Marcel Leonardi, compared the demands of the Brazilian National Association of Journalists to taxing a taxi driver for taking tourists to eat at a particular restaurant.
“Even if some countries do get Google to pay up for using their headlines and some text from articles, it will hardly plug the holes in their newspapers’ revenues, or speed their restructuring,” said an article in the Economist published a few weeks back.
All in all, newspapers ought to understand and accept the changing façade of the media world as we know it today. What’s needed is for newspapers to come up with more creative ways of generating revenues than forcing Google to pay them up. It’s time to embrace the digital media and come up with ways of cashing on it too.