Search tech developers win over newspaper industry
The Norwegian Newspaper Organization has for years been threatening local search engines that crawls and indexes online newspaper content. A longer discussion has now ended – the newspaper industry gave up.
â€Our last point was that if they would not lets us crawl, index and distribute their content we would make our software available under the free license GNU. That means that they overnight would not just have us at Infostill to deal with but thousands of small companies doing media monitoring them selves in Norway and abroad. Everybody would be able to make their own private open source search engine in less than a couple of hours,†says the chief programmer of the Infostill Agent server application Stig Bordensius.
The Norwegian Newspaper Organization now accepts that Infostill crawls, indexes and distribute as long as Infostill does not sell the articles.
Deep linking to newspaper content and indexing by bots have in Scandinavia been compared to theft and bloodsucking and searchtech companies like Newsbooster have been shut down.
The big problem here is that media organizations claim the right to how their content should be published, read and distributed on the Internet.
This idea is just so 1997, where the common understanding of the Internet was about a number of portals with a front page that led to sub pages. –Just like a printed newspaper.
Now this is not the case anymore. The net is interconnected by crawlers, spiders, viewers, readers, active indexes, real-time search engines and a growing number of bloggers making copies and comments.
The established online newspaper industry in Scandinavia wants their users to access their content from the â€front page†of their site, because here is the most expensive ads, and this is partly the reason for the conflict.
Infostill is a Norwegian company, but it also has a Danish service. In Denmark things are still rough for the search engine industry. Still today the newspaper lobby claim that deep-linking and indexing is illegal. – Just what search engines like Google does is actually illegal in Denmark! And there are several examples of bloggers that have been harassed for making deep links to stories in the major newspapers.
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