Google - kleptomaniacs?

11 Nov 2009

The Great Debate at the 62nd World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India, plans to examine questions surrounding Google as news publishers worldwide examine and discuss their options and strategies in gaining higher advertising revenues which are currently being reaped by the search engine. The congress takes place 1-3 December 2009.

David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal council of Google, will be on stage to give the search giant's perspectives. Gavin O'Reilly, CEO of Independent News & Media and president of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), and the participants will debate with him. In the moderator's chair: Kees Spaan, chairman of the Copyright Working Party of the European Newspaper Publishers Association.

Drummond leads Google's global teams for legal, government relations, corporate development and new business development, including strategic partnerships. Before joining Google in 2002, he served as its first outside counsel and worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to incorporate the company and secure its initial round of financing.

Gavin O'Reilly was probably the first major news industry personality to publicly criticise Google, when he called them 'kleptomaniacs' in a 2006 speech where he said they were "increasingly aiming their strategic efforts at traditional content originators and aggregators like newspaper publishers. The irony is that these search engines exist, largely, because of the traditional news and content aggregators and profit at their expense."

Since then, others have joined in the chorus of opposition, most notably Rupert Murdoch, who said last month: "The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. If we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph." Murdoch just this week threatened to block Google News from taking any content from News Corp websites.

News Corp will be represented at the congress by Les Hinton, chief executive of Dow Jones & Co., the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, who will speak about the company's multimedia strategies, including plans to shift away from free content on the internet.

For full details on the 62nd World Newspaper Congress, 16th World Editors Forum and Info Services Expo 2009, go to www.wanindia2009.com