Danny Sullivan is straightforward about the arrogance of legacy media:
“Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?” asked the News Corp. chief at a cable industry confab in Washington, D.C., Thursday. The answer, said Murdoch, should be, ” ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ “
Let me help you with that, Rupert. I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with one simple line. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall St. Journal at all.
There’s also a policy statement from Google; associate general counsel Alexander Macgillivray: Don’t point fingers at us.
“We show snippets and links under the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the United States Copyright Act.
“Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index–all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards.”