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From left to right: Thierry Geerts, Managing Director, Google Belgium; Frans Wauter, representative of the authors' associations; Francois leHodey, representative of the Belgian French language news publishers at the Google office in Brussels.

We have reached an agreement that ends all litigation and represents great news for both us and the newspapers. We continue to believe that our services respect newspaper copyrights and it is important to note that we are not paying the Belgian publishers or authors to include their content in our services. From now on, Google and Belgian French-language publishers will partner on a broad range of business initiatives, in order to:
  • Promote both the publishers’ and Google’s services - Google will advertise its services on the publishers’ media, while the publishers will optimise their use of Google’s advertising solutions, in particular AdWords to attract new readers.
  • Increase publishers’ revenue - by collaborating on making money with content, both via premium models (paywalls, subscriptions), and via advertising solutions such as the AdSense platform and the AdExchange marketplace;
  • Increase reader engagement - by implementing Google+ social tools, including video Hangouts, on news sites, and launching official YouTube channels;
  • Increase the accessibility of the publishers’ content - by collaborating on the distribution of the publishers original content on mobile platforms, in particular smartphones and tablets;
This agreement comes at an important moment, in the midst of a debate how best the newspaper industry should adapt to the new digital age. As the Economist recently reported under the enticing headline, Letting the Baby Dance, many governments including Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia, UK and Canada are considering or have gone ahead with Internet-friendly copyright reforms. At the same time, some European countries including Germany and France are considering an extension of copyright protection to excerpts of newspaper articles appearing in search engines’ results. The European Journalism Centre recently outlined why both Google and newspapers would be best off cooperating and The Reach Group published independent research reaching a similar conclusion.

We agree. Many win-win ways exist for Google and publishers to join forces in the new digital universe. We drive traffic to publishers - four billion clicks a month around the globe, offering publishers 100,000 business opportunities per minute. Our AdSense program pays out $7 billion a year to web publishers worldwide. Publishers remain free, with the addition of just a few lines of code, to pull out of Google web search and Google News. Publishers also remain free to determine whether to put their articles discovered through Google search behind a paywall.

Instead of continuing to argue over legal interpretations, we have agreed on the need to set aside past grievances in favour of collaboration. This is the same message we would like to send to other publishers around the world - its much more beneficial for us to work together than to fight.

Posted by Thierry Geerts, Managing Director, Google Belgium
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That’s why today we’re launching an information campaign, Dein Netz, to give the facts about the proposed law and to invite you to contribute to the debate, in person and online.

German news publishers are seeking to extend dramatically the reach of copyright law. Today it prevents copying of articles, but the proposals would place restrictions on even a ‘snippet’ of an article, such as is common found in search engine results. Snippets help people understand, compare and evaluate which websites to visit. If enacted, the law would force search engines, news aggregators and many other online services that help people locate information online to contract with publishers in order to show a snippet of what is available.



That would be complete reversal of the legal situation today where the display of snippets is permitted. The European Journalism Centre recently compared this to asking “your local newsstand ... to pay royalties for exhibiting the papers and magazines” it has on display. From then on, the simple act of linking or displaying snippets would become fraught with legal risk.

It would also be a reversal of the practices we see on the web today. When Google’s web crawler requests copies of pages from a publisher’s website, it is clear from where the request comes, and it is for the publisher to decide whether their server responds. In fact, virtually all publishers welcome crawlers and many voluntarily provide specific additional information to help crawlers find pages (in the form of a sitemap). A further set of highly refined controls is also available to publishers through the robots exclusion protocol that we have blogged in the past.

The end result is that, as one of many ways people find news content, Google News and Google search sends around four billion clicks through to publishers each month. That’s significant for us because there is no advertising on Google News in Europe. But Google is frequently one of the advertising service providers for the major news publishers (even of our most vocal critics in this debate), so our opportunity to make money is when users click on a link and go to the site of of one of our partners in the news industry. Looked at globally and across all web publishing businesses, Google shared $7 billion of advertising revenue last year.

We want to build win-win ways to partner with publishers. What we want to avoid is a system that puts the brakes on the open Internet, limits choice for people looking for information, and dramatically raises the cost of online innovation.

Please take a few minutes to look through our campaign site. Please get involved. You only have a limited amount of time to defend your Internet!

Posted by Simon Hampton, Director, Public Policy, Europe
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On the evening of November 29, the teams will present their final projects. Google’s consultant for editorial innovation Daniel Sieberg , Emmy-nominated and award-winning science and technology TV correspondent and author, will give a keynote speech about the future of journalism. A jury of experts will select the best project, and the team will be invited to the Editors' Lab final stage – the International News Hackathon during the 2013 GEN News Summit in June 2013 at the Paris City Hall. Last year’s event attracted several hundred entires from around the world.



This workshop represents only the latest initiative to partner with the French press. Over the past year, we have worked with Le Monde to bring Tunisian journalists into their newsroom. We worked with Liberation on their Forum de Lyon. And we have sponsored digital news awards for students studying at Institut de Science Politique’s Journalism School.

For more information regarding the Editors’ Lab - Paris, contact GEN Deputy Director Antoine Laurent or Le Nouvel Observateur Online Editor Aurelien Viers.

Posted by Anne-Gabrielle Dauba-Pantanacce, Head of Communications, France
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Innovation is not just about science and technology. It’s about arts and culture, too. Technological development and the arts have always had a symbiotic relationship. For example, the videocassette recorder led to new markets for movies and television. Computer animation was once considered by some to be just a novelty until Pixar came along and redefined the entire genre of animated film.

How should creativity be measured in the Internet era? Many traditional measures of creativity tended to focus on particular industries, rather than content creation by individuals. This made some sense in the past -- producing and widely distributing content was expensive, something only a few broadcasters, newspapers, record labels, and studios were capable of. But today the Internet allows anyone, anywhere to instantly connect with an audience of billions, and more content is being produced on more platforms than ever before.

Researchers are only starting to come to grips with this challenge, and today the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and business school INSEAD have made an important contribution. In its annual Global Innovation Index—a report that ranks 141 countries based on their innovation capabilities and results—WIPO adds new measures of creativity online. Specifically, the report measures the creation of online content by including two metrics focused on the creation of Internet sites—generic top-level domains and country codes TLDs—and two metrics focused on online participation in the creation of content—Wikipedia edits and YouTube uploads.

This does not solve the problem of how to measure online creativity, let alone its relationship to innovation. We hope more people will follow this new report’s lead and develop methodologies for quantifying online creativity and its contributions to innovation. Robust data are the bedrock of public policy, and 20th century metrics are inadequate measures for the 21st century economy.

As part of the report, WIPO also gave Google the opportunity to offer our thoughts on the role that the Internet plays in driving creativity, and ways to improve measurement:
...output metrics need to more rigorously account for the sheer quantity of art being produced. Today, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day, and there are 440 blogs for every autobiography available on Amazon. Yet, if one is measuring only traditional, professional distribution channels, this creativity would not be part of the picture.
You can read our chapter here, and the whole report here.

Posted by Derek Slater, Policy Manager
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Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why. To promote that transparency, we have long shared copies of copyright removal requests with Chilling Effects, a nonprofit organization that collects these notices from Internet users and companies. We also include a notice in our search results when items have been removed in response to copyright removal requests.

We believe that the time-tested “notice-and-takedown” process for copyright strikes the right balance between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users, and our efforts to provide a useful Google Search experience. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process. We already mentioned that we’re processing more copyright removal requests for Search than ever before. And we’re also processing these requests faster than ever before; last week our average turnaround time was less than 11 hours.

At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results. We try to catch these ourselves, but we also notify webmasters in our Webmaster Tools when pages on their website have been targeted by a copyright removal request, so that they can submit a counter-notice if they believe the removal request was inaccurate.

Transparency is a crucial element to making this system work well. We look forward to making more improvements to our Transparency Report—offering copyright owners, Internet users, policymakers and website owners the data they need to see and understand how removal requests from both governments and private parties affect our results in Search.

Update December 11, 2012: Starting today, anyone interested in studying the data can download all the data shown for copyright removals in the Transparency Report. We are also providing information about how often we remove search results that link to allegedly infringing material. Specifically, we are disclosing how many URLs we removed for each request and specified website, the overall removal rate for each request and the specific URLs we did not act on. Between December 2011 and November 2012, we removed 97.5% of all URLs specified in copyright removal requests. Read more on Policy by the Numbers.

Posted by Fred von Lohmann, Senior Copyright Counsel
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Now, with the launch of our new Big Tent YouTube channel , everyone can engage with these debates online.

The channel includes videos from our sessions so far in London , The Hague, Berlin and Madrid. You can filter by topic, speaker and event, so whether you’re interested in privacy or child safety, Hillary Clinton on Internet freedom or Wael Ghonim on the role of the Internet in Egypt’s revolution, it’s all available under the Big Tent.



The launch of our new channel coincides with our first Big Tent in the US--an event on Digital Citizenship held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Over the course of the day, we discussed child safety online, the most effective ways to incorporate technology with educationa and what governments and civil society can do to maintain a responsible and innovative web.




Stay tuned for videos from that and future Big Tents as the programme continues to roll out across the world.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director of External Relations EMEA
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Journalism is changing fast as media businesses adapt and experiment with ways of gathering and reporting the news in the digital age. Here’s news of two contests we’re sponsoring to help stimulate innovation in digital reporting.

IPI News Innovation Contest
We’re pleased to congratulate the first three winners selected by the Vienna-based International Press Institute in its News Innovation Contest. The prizes are part of a $5 million global contest launched by Google last year.

Today’s winners, who will receive grants totalling $600,000, are:
This is just the first round of the contest. In 2012, the IPI will consider a new set of proposals and award the remainder of the grant. More details are available at www.ipinewscontest.org.

GEN Data Journalism Awards
In Hong Kong, at the News World Summit hosted by the Global Editors Network, we're announcing a partnership on a new data journalism contest.

GEN’s Data Journalism Awards will celebrate the best examples of this new form of journalism from established news organisations and newcomers.

The winners will be chosen by an international jury and prizes awarded at the next GEN conference in Paris next year. Details on how to take part are at globaleditorsnetwork.org.

We look forward to seeing the impact these initiatives will have on digital journalism and hope they will encourage continued experimentation at every level of the media.

Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations, Europe, Middle East and Africa
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