Google: We're good for newspapers

Here's Google's side of the argument over whether aggregators like Google and Yahoo should be able to link to AP stories on newspaper sites. It's a thorny legal issue.

Google lawyer Alexander Macgillivray wrote:

"For news articles we've crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more -- the headline, a 'snippet' of a line or two of text, and a link back to the news publisher's website."

Which I guess is the same thing I just did here. The difference, I'm afraid, is that a whole lot of people scan those quick summaries on Yahoo or Google and never follow the link. So the newspapers and other news organizations do all the heavy lifting, and the aggregators quickly summarize it and then get the traffic and revenue.

All of which, I guess, renders newspapers the news wholesalers and aggregators the news retailers. Except the wholesalers aren't getting paid by the retailers. So before long, this model collapses.