• GigaOm, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 11:15 AM

Publishers of all kinds--books, newspapers, even music distributors--are lining up to complain about the treatment they receive from Web giant Google. "Google should pay me for X" tends to be their mantra, and GigaOm's Mathew Ingram points out that the number of complaints seems to accelerate in lockstep with the decline of content-related industries of all kinds.

As Ingram says, "everyone from the World Association of Newspapers to the American Authors Association seems convinced that the Internet owes them a living, and that Google...is the best one to settle the bill, especially since it has billions of dollars just lying around, like Scrooge McDuck." Ingram points to an opinion piece by Pete Osnos, a former journalist turned book publisher, called "Make Google Pay." In it, Osnos argues that Google should pay newspaper publishers for distributing their content without permission on Google News, a move that he says would save the newspaper industry.

"This argument is so full of holes that it's difficult to know where to begin," says Ingram. For starters, Google News doesn't show ads, so there are no "advertising revenues generated by use of (the newspapers') stories." There is referral revenue, but this is different. Point No. 2 is that books are not newspapers. The only way book scanning, which Google paid book publishers for the right to do, would be comparable to Google News is if Google every morning bought newspapers and scanned them manually. Ingram points out that stories only show up in Google News because publishers make them available for free. If you don't want Google to scan your stories, you can simply block your content from Google's crawlers.

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