NAA Congres 2009: Google moet centjes delen met kranten

Tenminste, zie titel, dat vonden sómmige vertegenwoordigers van dagbladbedrijven op het NAA (Newspaper Association of America) congres, dat deze week plaatsvond. Op de BBC een mooi artikel met veel citaten over de discussie na afloop van de keynote van Google CEO Eric Schmidt (zie video). Ruport Murdoch (‘Should we be allowing Google to steal our copyrights? If you have a brand like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, you don’t have to.’) mengde zich in de discussie, ook Associated Press deed mee. Het ging over fair use, over parasitair gedrag. Eric Schmidt knuffelde (‘I love newspapers. I may be one of the last people who really, really loves newspapers’), en deelde wat klappen uit:

‘I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants,’ zei Schmidt onder anderen. Maar hij zei ook: ‘These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.’ Schmidt vindt, dat de kranten het internet prima geinternaliseerd hebben in hun bedrijfsproces. Maar: ‘they had since dropped the ball allowing the likes of Google to take over content distribution.’

Mooie discussie, die ook in ons land gevoerd zou kunnen en moeten worden. Over ‘fair use’ zei Eric Schmidt:

‘From our perspective there is always a tension around fair use and fair use is a balance of interest in favour of the consumer.’

en ook:

‘Anything that makes it easier for your content to get to your users is a win.’

Tegenwerping van Ken Docter, niet op het congres, maar geïnterviewd door de BBC:

‘The real question is is it fair for news companies to produce all this content for Google and for Google to keep the lion’s share of revenue. Google is a wonderful company and has done wonderful things as an aggregator and search and built a model on the fly that means whoever gets the last click gets all the benefit. It’s time to reboot the system.’

Robert Thompson, de managing editor van The Wall Street Journal ging verder in de aanval:

“There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues. There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet.’

En zo gaat de discussie nog even door….