In a blog post on Wednesday, Google said it has resolved a long-running dispute with Belgian newspapers that have demanded copyright fees every time Google displays a link or excerpts to one of their stories. Google’s announcement says the parties are “collaborating” to make money but also takes pains to note that “we are not paying the Belgian publishers or authors to include their content in our services”. Oh, really?

US press outlets have noted Google is paying all the legal fees but have generally framed the deal as a tie or a win for Google. The Europeans, however, have been less gracious. Le Monde‘s triumphant account begins by explaining that the Belgian papers “forced Google to bend” and that Google will “compensate” papers and journalists to the tune of “2 to 3 percent of sales” — or “around 5 million euros” ($6.5 million).

So what exactly happened? Did Google pay up or not? The solution to the mystery lies in a part of the blog post where Google explains the ways it will work with the papers, including: “Google will advertise its services on the publishers’ media.” In other words, the American search giant appears to have bought millions of dollars of advertising in the hopes of staving off a direct copyright levy. The company did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

On its face, this is not a bad deal for Google. Given the anti-American regulatory climate in Europe, the company had a weak hand to play. Paying $6 millon to end the Belgian headache may be a good investment, especially as the company can still claim (technically at least) that it still does not pay copyright fees for newspaper excerpts.

The danger, of course, is that the rest of Europe will soon be beating a path to Google’s door demanding similar payouts. As we’ve noted, France and Germany are already kicking up dust over the copyright issue too (so is Brazil). The Le Monde story will only embolden them.

In the bigger picture, European news publishers would be better served by dropping the half-baked copyright claims (Google’s fair use case for excerpts is strong) and getting on with the painful process of digitization. The continent has wonderful newspapers but the ongoing prevalence of print is astounding compared to North America.

(Image by Sergey Mironov via Shutterstock)

Google chairman Eric Schmidt met French president François Hollande on Monday at the Elysée, which, in a statement, says:

“(Hollande) stressed that dialogue and negotiation between partners seemed, to him, the best way – but, if necessary, a law could intervene on this issue, as with the current project in Germany. The development of the digital economy calls for an adaptation in taxation in order to better understand the value of sharing and funding the creation of content.”

A unified policy from Europe’s two big axes, France and Germany, against Google’s view — that it crawls news stories but publishes only excerpts – could be a big problem for Mountain View.

Eric Schmidt meets France’s president, culture minister and other ministers

In August, Germany’s Bundestag passed Leistungsschutzrecht, a copyright law amendment devised by the country’s coalition government that will give news publishers a year-long exclusive right to publish their material online, requiring others obtain a license to excerpt.

Such legislation is likely devised from a position defending troubled industries, rather than genuinely safeguarding Fair Use-style rights. But that doesn’t mean Google won’t have to deploy its policy arsenal in defense again all the same.

Google wrote to several French ministers earlier this month with a threat of its own — if the levy is implemented, “as a consequence, (we) would be required to no longer reference French sites.” Google warned that France’s proposal would “threaten its very existence” and harm the content market, AFP reported.

Eric Schmidt arrives at the Élysée

This all sounds familiar…

Google’s most notable European news worries came in Belgium, where in 2007 a court ruled that Google did not have the right to run story excerpts from members of the Copiepresse trade group. Google duly pulled the newspaper sites’ out of Google News — ironically, much to their chagrin. Later, they struck an agreement — undetailed — through which Google restored the content in mid-2011.

Now the issue looks like re-opening again…

• France: Hollande is in a good position to make headway, emboldened both by the European Commission’s competition scrutiny of Google’s indexing algorithm and by its French-led inquiry that has ordered Google to re-separate its recently united privacy policies.
• Germany: The extent to which Google is really encapsulated by Leistungsschutzrecht is not fully clear, but a test could be on the horizon.
• Brazil: 154 newspapers comprising 90 percent of the market are withholding their content from Google News, and say they have barely lost any traffic.

Not everyone takes the same stance. UK newspapers, supported by the country’s copyright court, also now require commercial aggregators pay a license for re-use, but their definition of “commercial” encompasses only paid clipping services, not free services like Google News. That means Google can limbo under the law by choosing not to commercialize its service.

That is not necessarily a productive situation. Together with its stock defense (“we drive four billion clicks to news publishers”), this “we don’t profit from your content” argument may be one which Google deploys in negotiation. But that won’t necessarily trump the equal refrain from many a worried publisher: “Neither do we!”

The New York Times hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with its digital content in the past: The only way you could get it was through the newspaper’s apps or via excerpts on a site like the Huffington Post or Google News. That is why the deal it announced early Monday morning with the magazine-style news aggregation engine Flipboard is worth paying attention to. For the first time, subscribers will be able to access Times content via something other than the NYT‘s own site or apps. It may not be a huge revenue generator (at least not in the short term), but it is still an encouraging sign of a traditional media player trying to adapt to a new model.

Starting this Thursday, the Times will provide all of its content — articles, videos, photo slideshows and blog posts — to subscribers who use Flipboard, while nonsubscribers will get a free sample of certain articles. Denise Warren, who runs the NYT‘s website, said the deal made sense for the newspaper because it is promoting digital subscriptions, and an analysis of its readership showed that 20 percent of the paper’s subscribers use third-party apps like Flipboard to consume content. Said Warren:

We realized that we have an opportunity to enable this kind of access for paying subscribers, and we thought it was something we ought to try and see how users react to it.

People discover content differently now

At last the NYT seems to be recognizing people are discovering content in new ways now, thanks to the “democratization of distribution” provided by the web and social media. Growing numbers of readers and news consumers no longer simply go to the home page of a newspaper and read it or subscribe through a single provider’s app. They get their news through aggregators like Google News and Flipboard or through Twitter links, Facebook and a variety of other methods. A survey by the Pew Center found that almost as many people use aggregators as consume news directly from a news source or get to it via a search engine.

Until now the New York Times has taken the same approach as most other traditional media players, which is to try to recreate the scarcity model that worked in print but publishing only through for-pay apps on smartphones and tablets and by putting up subscription-only paywalls. While the Flipboard deal doesn’t provide a way around that paywall, it at least gets Times content in front of more people (potentially), and that could give them an incentive to subscribe, as Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg noted on Twitter.

It’s not clear from the comments Flipboard CEO Mike McCue has made whether the New York Times will also be experimenting with a revenue-sharing deal involving Flipboard ads. Some publishers, including Wired and the New Yorker, told Advertising Age magazine they are shutting down their advertising partnerships with Flipboard, saying they are concerned about driving subscribers away from their own apps and websites to Flipboard, which in some sense is a competitor. Both will now only provide excerpts of articles (although any content posted on their websites can still be viewed in a web browser within Flipboard). Said Wired‘s publisher:

If digital consumers want to interact with Wired, they can do so at Wired.com and not through an intermediary.

Walled gardens don’t work as well as they used to

This is a typical kind of “control the content” approach, one that is becoming less and less relevant as the digital-information explosion continues to level traditional print-based business models. While the New York Times seems to be trying to have its cake and eat it too — by keeping a paywall while still providing content through Flipboard — it is at least taking advantage of a new distribution system as a way of reaching its audience.

In that sense the Flipboard arrangement is a sign the newspaper might be undergoing a philosophical or cultural change when it comes to content, something it will hopefully continue as it searches for a new CEO who can take it into a digital future. In addition to Flipboard, the newspaper also announced another interesting digital-native partnership recently: namely, a deal with viral web-content aggregator BuzzFeed, to share knowledge related to the election and other topics. Learning from new providers is smart.

It’s possible the Flipboard deal won’t really produce much in the way of incremental revenue for the Times, at least not in the short term, but at least it will provide one thing: more data on what readers want and when and where they want it. And at some point the newspaper could decide to open up even more of its content to readers through Flipboard and other venues — the way that online-journalism veteran Steve Outing says it should — and take a gamble on ad revenue from that new source as a way of bridging the digital gap newspapers are suffering from.

Predicting exactly which strategies will work is almost impossible at this point, since the process of reinvention and adaptation is always somewhat chaotic, as media analyst and journalism professor Clay Shirky has noted. That just means more experimentation is required, and it’s good to see the New York Times taking some small steps in that direction.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user jphilipg

Google News Near You is simply that: a list of headlines curated by Google News that uses your location as a signal for what to display. Google made sure to emphasize that mobile Web surfers (works on iPhone and Android phones, but apparently not tablets) have to opt into the feature, perhaps mindful of the recent unease over how mobile phones collect and store location-aware data.

Google has offered the option to customize Google News by location for some time, but this is feature will allow that section to change with your travels, rather than always surfacing hometown news when on a business trip to another city. Visitors to the mobile site will be asked if they want to share their location with Google News the next time they visit the site, and the feature can be turned off later.

Google News was born in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. An unprecedented act of terrorism on U.S. soil, by a foreign militant group led by Osama Bin Laden, changed the course of history. People around the world were trying to comprehend what had just happened, and its implications to public safety, foreign policy, financial markets, and their own lives. Much of that exploration happened online.

At Google we realized that our ability to display links to the freshest and most relevant news was limited by a fundamental problem: fresh news lacked hyperlinks. Google’s ranking depended on links from other authors on the web. Fresh news, by definition, was too fresh to accumulate such links. A new importance signal was needed.

I realized that if Google could compute how many news sources were covering the underlying story at a given point in time, we could then estimate how important the story was. Thus, “Storyrank” was invented. This insight led to a ranking that combined the editorial wisdom of many editors on the web in real time. In addition to making search better it led to Google News – a display of stories in the news ranked automatically by an algorithm. This also allowed us to group news articles by story, thus providing visual structure and giving users access to diverse perspectives from around the world in one place.

After 10 years Mr. Bin Laden is in the news again.

Continue reading on the Google News blog.

This article originally appeared in Google News.

In the past, however, users had to indicate topics they were interested in to see a customized stream of headlines. Under the update announced today, users will automatically see a personalized stream of stories based on the type of articles they have clicked on in the past.

In its blog post announcing the update, Google says, “We found that more users clicked on more stories when we added this automatic personalization, sending more traffic to publishers.”

Users can opt out, although this is very much the way news consumption seems to be headed, with big portals, like MSN, and up-and-coming services, like Zite and News.me, adjusting what they show users based on their behavior.

Ahmed, for the benefit of readers who don’t subscribe to The Times, writes that Bharat stands “accused of heralding the death of print publications” and “obscuring editorial decision-making”, while unnamed “analysts” say the site has “accelerated the internet’s impact on declining newspaper circulations” and unbundling has “left news organisations to rely on online advertising sold next to single articles rather than a package of stories or in a whole print edition”.

All of which gives Bharat the opportunity to repeat his defence: “Classifieds vanished long before we existed. We didn’t cause this. The fact is news is online for free, monetised by ads.”

Although The Times story reports Google helps fee-charging publishers with access technology, you won’t find Times stories, not even Murad’s, in Google News – the paper has rendered articles invisible to Bharat’s baby, instead favouring rebundling through its frontdoor.

News International, of course, is not alone amongst publishers lamenting the splintering of self-contained news products in to a million pieces, which is as much an internet effect as a Google effect.

» The Times is publishing a series of stories picked up from a visit to the Googleplex — see also Ahmed’s interview with Google CFO Patrick Pichette and search executive Ben Gomes, Mark Burton’s tour of the HQ and Ahmed’s snapshots of Google’s strategic struggles.

At one point earlier this year, Google News stopped hosting new AP content, apparently expecting that the deal wouldn’t be renewed, although eventually, AP stories reappeared. AP CEO Tom Curley had also hinted that Google wasn’t willing to acquiesce to some of the AP’s demands, saying in October,

Cohen admits the new options give publishers more control but reminds that the ability to block content isn’t new. Using the famous Robots Exclusion Protocol — trotted out whenever someone at Google or elsewhere wants to remind publishers that no one forces them to make their content available — already does that. But until now, applying exclusions to Google News took filling out a contact form. Now publishers will be able to do it themselves with the same abilities they have in Google:

“Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don’t even have to contact us – they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They’ll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP.”

That’s not giving in to News Corp. That’s saying, go ahead, find another excuse. Or as Cohen puts it: “We respect publishers’ wishes. If publishers don’t want their websites to appear in web search results or in Google News, we want to give them easy ways to remove it.”

As for the First Click Free changes, yes, it will be harder for people to game the system. But five stories a day for free ought to be enough for most casual readers. Anyone who needs more might consider supporting the publication.