Google and its parent Alphabet are being called to account by a large publisher for allegedly ripping off its content.
Penske Media, which owns Billboard,
Rolling Stone, WWD, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Vibe and other titles, filed a lawsuit against Google late last week, charging that Google’s AI summaries directly provide users with
PMC content, decreasing traffic to its sites.
The complaint adds that “Google’s use of online publishing content to compete directly with publishers, without compensation to those
publishers, constitutes an underpayment to those online publishers in the Input Market for search.”
In particular, “Google’s Knowledge Panels began to include
lengthy snippets of journalistic or informational articles or other webpages, often with accompanying photos,” it states.
It’s not as if publishers can do anything
about it short of going to court.
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"The decision to opt out of republishing by disallowing
snippets or withholding Search Index Data is a Hobson’s choice," the complaint asserts. :Virtually no digital publishers can afford to take such drastic action, because withholding data from
Google’s search index means demotion on the SERP (search engine results page) or disappearing from Google’s organic search results entirely, and as outlined above, appearing prominently in
Google’s SERP is an essential means of generating traffic and revenue for digital publishers."
The suit asks for damages, injunctive relief and costs.
One would expect that PMC has the resources to take on the search giant. And we can expect a robust response from Google.
The complaint includes a purported history of Google’s
incursion into the publishing field.
“During Phase I, Google displayed increasingly detailed excerpts (“snippets”) of other online publishers’ content,” it
says.
In Phase 2, “Google now uses the inputs (online publishing content) not only to populate search results, but also as an input for Google to directly compete with online
publishers in the relevant output market for online publishing (through Google’s AI Overviews).”
To do this, Google “did not start hiring writers and editors,” the
complaint states.. “It did not even license content from third parties to republish. Instead, Google began repurposing the content that online publishers had created by investing in human
talent, technology, and infrastructure.”
In contrast, PMC employs almost 800 people involved in content production.
Presumably, Google can count on little support in the
publishing industry.
“Some AI shops are good actors,” Neil Vogel, CEO of People Inc. during The Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference last week, according to Fortune.
“OpenAI is a good guy,” said Vogel. “The worst guy is Google.”
The case is on file with the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia.