[W]hile other online publishers like Yahoo News and MSNBC earn tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year and continue to grow, Google News remains in beta mode -- three years after it launched -- long after most of the bugs have been excised.
The reason: The minute Google News runs paid advertising of any sort it could face a torrent of cease-and-desist letters from the legal departments of newspapers, which would argue that "fair use" doesn't cover lifting headlines and lead paragraphs verbatim from their articles. Other publishers might simply block users originating from Google News, effectively snuffing it out.
I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.
I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.
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Google News still in beta after three years
There is an interesting article on the Wired website (discussed on Slashdot) that describes a curious legal issue for Google News. It seems that while the launch of Google News terrified online news services that spent a fortune writing their own content, the Google model of inexpensively scraping headlines from other sites ultimately hit a snag. One of the interesting passages from the article reads:
My school never offered me a margarita
The school I attended in Canberra, Australia, had a typical, and not especially exciting, lunch menu when I was there in the 1980s and 1990s. Recently, here in the US State of Virginia, there has been an unplanned exercise in more interesting school catering -- a Virginia school accidentally handed out margaritas (including tequila) that were left over from a board/faculty/staff event. It seems that the margarita mix in the refrigerator was mistaken for limeade.
The students "said [the margaritas] didn't taste good". Staff "quickly collected all of the cups and saw that although some small sips had been taken; none were emptied".
I reckon my classmates would have been much more adventurous!