They say you should never take on people who spill ink by the barrel, but your odds are better when you traffic in terabytes of data. In the United States, Google and big media went at it for several years over Google News and Google won, taking its argument for a free and open Internet all the way to the bank.
Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
?Whenever you are dealing with government, you want to be very clear about what you will do and will not do,? said Eric Schmidt, Google?s executive chairman. ?And we don?t want to pay for content that we do not host. We are very clear on that.?
It?s a little counterintuitive, but large newspapers believed that Google was hurting them by generating a page of links ? with headlines and a short summary ? to articles that the newspapers had paid to create. Publishers said that what was supposed to be an index of the news had become the news, and was a disincentive for people to click through to the source.
American publishers eventually decided that the only thing worse than being aggregated by Google News was not being aggregated at all, but the fight has been joined anew in other countries by publishers who argue that the giant American search company is picking their pockets every time it links to articles.
There?s a large boycott under way in Brazil, punishing legislation is gaining momentum in Germany, and there is talk of a similar effort in France.
You wouldn?t know it by speaking to Eric Schmidt, Google?s executive chairman. He takes the challenges to Google News seriously ? he just returned from talks with President Fran?ois Hollande of France ? but he sounded sanguine on a phone call from Chicago.
?We had some good discussions, and I would expect that we will reach some kind of agreement by the end of the year,? he said.
Don?t expect that agreement to acknowledge the principle of so-called ancillary copyright, which has been pushed in Germany and elsewhere. It suggests that Google and others should pay for featuring headlines and the first few lines of an article, while Google asserts that this constitutes fair use.
In France and Germany, publishers have found willing partners in their national governments as they try to put the squeeze on Google. It probably won?t work no matter who is doing the squeezing, because while the rhetoric from Google is always friendly, its position is always firm.
?Whenever you are dealing with government, you want to be very clear about what you will do and will not do,? Mr. Schmidt said. ?And we don?t want to pay for content that we do not host. We are very clear on that.?
Back in this hemisphere, more than 150 newspapers in Brazil decided in 2011 to unilaterally pull themselves out of Google News, including many of the largest papers in the country. The debate blew up again at a conference in Brazil last month in which representatives from Google and the country?s newspapers had a heated argument over just how fair ?fair use? is. Again, Mr. Schmidt was hardly frantic about it.
?That?s a fine choice,? he said. ?Publishers are free to do as they wish, and there is plenty of competition for news in that country, so we are not overly concerned.?
There are a few reasons Google remains calm amid a storm of pushback. According to Google, its search engine delivers four billion clicks a month to news media outlets, one billion of which come from Google News. That?s a lot of leverage.
Publishers elsewhere have monitored the woes of American newspapers with a great deal of interest. German and Brazilian publishers are in good shape ? French newspapers less so ? and they still have a hold on their customers and their business models. They?d like to keep it that way.
?German publishers are in a much stronger position than their American counterparts. They watched the decline in American publishing and they are trying to fortify their lines while they can,? said Wolfgang Blau, editor in chief of Zeit Online in Germany, saying that legacy publishers would rather change the subject than their business model. ?It?s a lost battle really, but for the time being, Google is an easy target.?
In an e-mail, Mathias D?pfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, the largest newspaper publisher in Germany, said publishers everywhere needed to protect themselves in order to thrive.
E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
Twitter: @carr2n
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