Forgot your password?

+ - Zell Buys Tribune Co., Accuses Google of Stealing

Submitted by
NewsCloud writes "After buying Tribune Co. last week, Sam Zell told The Stanford Daily:

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do?" he asked. "We have a situation today where effectively the content is being paid for by the newspapers and stolen by Google, etcetera. That can last for a short time, but it can't last forever. I think Google and the boys understand that. We're going to see new deals and new formulas in the media space that reflect the reality of cost benefit."
None of this makes sense to me:

If newspapers don't want to share their headlines and abstracts, stop publishing RSS feeds. Furthermore, if you don't want Google News to crawl your content, exclude them in your robots.txt file. Google News has no ads. It's just using freely available material to drive traffic and potential revenue to newspaper Web sites. This represents a business opportunity. Perhaps not seeing this is why the newspapers are failing. Republishing 80 pixel square photos with material from public RSS feeds is not the same thing as hosting episodes of TV shows on YouTube.
