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Virtual Face-Off: What Does Google Owe Newspapers?
Opinionator — ... if you ignore the fact that this kind of use is a prime candidate for exclusion under the “fair use” clause in U.S. copyright law (which it almost certainly is), asking for payment makes no sense whatsoever. If you follow the logic of Osnos and his fellow Google-hounds, then I should be able to sue Google and be compensated for having my blog indexed in its search results. This is absurd, of course — as is Peter Osnos’s argument (former journalist Mark Potts makes some good points on his blog as well, calling Osnos’s theory “sheer idiocy”). The real reason that Osnos thinks ...

Can journalism go with the flow?
BuzzMachine — ... that newspapers have a God-given right to the income they used to get from advertising and that Google (and craigslist and eBay and papers’ own customers with their own, free web sites, for that matter) stole it from the papers and thus are starving journalism. Show me where that commandment is written. Others competed with lazy, monopolistic newspapers, giving the marketplace a better service. Google and the rest owe them nothing. Indeed, newspapers should be paying Google for its distribution and promotion, as Google is the new newsstand and content ...