Google gets into trouble with its new Scandinavian versions of Google News.

For those webmasters who are struggling to get into the Google News search results, this may come as a surprise, but there are actually several news sites that want to stop Google from spidering their sites in order to present news snippets on the Google News portal.

Pandia for one is glad to be included in Google News results, and we believe it benefits both us and Google to have news articles like this one included in news search results.

Nor do we think that Google is violating our intellectual property rights by quoting our headlines. After all, quoting and linking is part of what the Web is about, and as long as they stick to a few sentences we are not insulted.

Belgian newspapers banning Google News

However, not all news sites believe in our philosophy. Recently we saw a group of Belgian newspapers stopping Google from indexing their news. Yes, that’s true: Google were sending them a lot of traffic for free, but Copiepresse said no thanks, not unless you pay us!

And the strange thing is, that the only thing they had to do to stop Google from indexing them was to put up a robots.txt file that told Google to stay out.

All this can mean only one of two things: (1) The Belgian news sites do not understand how the Web operates or (2) they are becoming too greedy. None of these options sound good in our ears.

Google has, of course, rewarded the Belgian publishers by taking the results out of Google News.

Nor are they included in the Belgian Google News home page. The selection of news on the home page is generated automatically by Google’s robots computers, without the involvement of human editors

A new problem for Google: the inclusion of images

Last week’s launch of the Scandinavian versions of Google News, revealed a new and more serious problem for Google. While normal Web practice allows for short quotations and links to other sites, international intellectual property rights regulations do not allow the use of protected images and photographs.

However, Google News also includes photos in its home pages.

The Norwegian association for media companies, Mediebedriftenes Landsforening, argues that Google News Norway cannot make use of photographs without a proper agreement.

Dagens Næringsliv reports that the association has sent a letter to Google Norway and Google News arguing that this use of photographs is in violation with Norwegian copyright law.

However, according to Dagens Næringsliv, Google News’ Product Manager Nathan Stoll does not agree: “I have had more phone calls from people that complain about not being included, than publishers concerned about copyright,” he says.

The leader of the Norwegian Press Photographer’s Club Terje Bringedal argues that Google should know better. To Journalisten.no he says that to you use photographs without the owner’s permission must be considered theft.

Google News Denmark delayed

The Danish association of newspapers, Danske Dagblades Forening, managed to stop the launch of Google News Denmark. They argue that Google will have to make separate agreements with each one of the publishers.

According to Dagens Næringsliv, Google has now sent letters to all the relevant Danish newspapers and asked for permission to link to their news articles.

Keep photographs and linking apart

Pandia believes it is very important to keep the two issues of linking and the use of photographs apart.

We cannot have an intellectual property rights management that stops people from quoting and linking to newspaper articles without permission (in the way we have made use of the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv in this article). After all, newspaper journalists do exactly the same, quoting articles, blog posts and TV programmes.

Scholarly publications follow the same rule. You may quote a couple of paragraph as long as you give your source.

What journalists and researchers cannot do is to copy large parts of articles written by others, presenting the text is their own.

Moreover, it would be impossible to develop search engines if the search engine companies had to ask each and every web site owner for permission before linking to them. Nor would it be possible to develop web sites like Pandia.

Photographs is another matter. A photograph constitutes a complete work of art. To copy that image without paying the photographer or the copyright owner looks like a intellectual property right violation to us.

To us this means that Google should not give in to publishers demanding permission and compensation for Google linking to them. However, they should not make use of images without proper authorisation.

(Note: We are not in the legal profession, and this article should therefore not be considered legal advice.)