SimonWaldman.net

OK, so there are essays a-plenty re: Google and Belgium, and all the coverage you could ever need over at Search Engine Land. The world hasn’t changed. There are still appeals to go. Let’s not get over excited. But, I think the final bit of John Battelle’s FAQ puts it in context.

Q. So this is all about renegotiating the relationship between traditional media companies, their distribution networks, and the role of search in the new media landscape?

A. Yup.

And obviously I realised the whole case was a travesty after reading Rachel Whetstone’s explanation on the Google Blog. But I think things are getting a little more complex than this oft repeated Google mantra

We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content.

OK well, We believe that publishers are of real benefit to search engines because they provide valuable content for them to sell ads against. We also believe that when it comes to a news product - the timely use of even a headline and first par is actually a significant part of a story….but that is another matter.
It would be interesting if there was a spare academic/ economist out there to do some real number crunching and actually start to evaluate the mutual dependencies between content providers and searchengines/ aggregators and quantify the benefits each brings to the other, rather then rely on an endless stream of assertions on both sides. But until that day, it’s boom time for lawyers, methinks..

The full Gowers review on intellectual property will probably take a while for me to get through, but a quick skim turns up this gem in a section on Fair usage

Google explain in their response to the call for evidence: “The existence of a general fair use exception that can adapt to new technical environments may explain why the search engines first developed in the USA, where users were able to rely on flexible copyright exceptions, and not in the UK, where such uses would have been considered infringement”.

Oh really? I bet that when they passed this notion around in internal e-mails it was followed by a big ‘;-)‘.

I find it hard to believe they’ve included this quote in the report in all seriousness, without at least the words ‘Chinny Reckon’ in brackets after it.

It’s a nimble bit of debating on Google’s point - but rather defies the sort of empirical logic they have built their business on.

1) If the UK had led the way in all other web development except for search engines, this might have appeared to be the case. I think we know that’s not true.

2) I seem to remember Autonomy launching a consumer facing version of its search engine - it bombed, not for copyright reasons, but because well, there were better ones out there.

Actually - the one case where our law stifles innovation is in the murky world of the liability for community sites for defamation and contempt. But that’s to be discussed another time.

Oh and swapping Silicon Fenn for Silicon Valley might change a few things.