It seems like the content provider has little downside to doing this. News aggregator sends traffic to their page + news site seeks 'licensing' fees for that traffic = profit. I suppose there is the potential for the newspaper to lose money in legal fees as well as look like a jerk to people on the internet, but hey, gotta fight the inevitable demise of print media somehow.
Sometimes I just wish they would go out of business already. I think google should stop infringing their copyright too. You know, indexing Their Stuff and making links to it. That could do the trick. I wonder what they'd say then.
We see first hand what happens when disrupting incumbents who happen to also control politicians and have some good friends in the legal system. Hopefully the current people movement against copyright mafia will see further victories...
What does it mean to go out of business? Don't most newspapers make a loss? [1] (Excluding The Sun, obviously.) I don't think the motivation for funding them is profit, but influence, and so they'll continue to be produced for quite a while.
Regarding Google, didn't Murdoch complain about just that? [2]
However, I think even Mr Murdoch's personal wealth could not sustain the losses of digital news outlets should Google comply and stop indexing them. By any means, they just have to put a little piece of text in their robots file to do just that - so this is yet more talk in favor of strong copyrights, and no action to renew anything.
> It seems like the content provider has little downside to doing this.
Seems obvious, but not to everyone. Some of those companies are trying everything they can to claw a buck (or in this case, a pound) wherever they can, no matter who it hurts.
The sensible thing for cutbot to do is just cut them off (no pun intended).
