E-Media Tidbits

On September 1, Google News Japan launched. However, it's missing the news from of one of Japan's major dailies, Yomiuri Shimbun. The September 2004 NSK News Bulletin reports, "Google's service is bringing up questions about the protection of copyrights for headlines and about having direct access to individual news articles that bypasses upper pages of the host websites. The Google official said that Google sees information on the Internet as public property, although this stance may be open to question, as is being debated in some court cases already. ... According to the Yomiuri, Google officials visited to request its cooperation on August 31. A Yomiuri official said that the company flatly refused to be used by Google, citing the fact that the Yomiuri is providing news to Yahoo! in return for fees and that headlines are protected by copyright."

Interesting case. I honestly don't know how popular Google is in Japan. I was frankly surprised to learn that it's only just now launching the Japanese edition of Google News. However, I know that in the US media, NOT having your headlines indexed in Google News is pretty much online-news suicide. It's one of those cases where traditional copyright protections are clashing uncomfortably with the realities of online media. It'll be interesting to see whether Yomiuri executives change their minds later. I guess that depends on how popular Google News Japan becomes. (Thanks to editorsweblog for the link to the NSK Bulletin story.)