Google to Newspapers: We're Not the Bad Guys

An awful lot of fingers have been pointed at Google recently. Just in the last few days, the search giant has been accused of kidnapping "orphaned" books, violating trademarks with deceptive keyword ads, and stealing copyrighted news content -- this last by Rupert Murdoch, who's no stranger to playing the villain.

So when the Associated Press announced plans yesterday to combat misuse of news stories by certain nameless web operators, many naturally assumed Google was the main target. But Eric Schmidt says that's not the case.

"I was a little confused by all of the excitement in the news in the last 24 hours," said the Google CEO this afternoon during a keynote appearance at the Newspaper Association of America's annual conference. "I'm not sure what they were referring to. We have a very, very successful deal with AP and hope that will continue for many, many years."

(Echoing his boss, Google's associate general counsel for products and intellectual property, Alexander Macgillivray, wrote on the company's blog that AP's broadside "doesn't appear to pertain" to Google -- particularly since Google actually hosts AP articles on its own servers under the terms of their licensing deal.)

But Schmidt nevertheless seemed to be sending his own not-so-coded message to AP and its newspaper-industry allies when he warned them against waging an all-out legal campaign to stamp out unauthorized re-posting of their content, even if that re-posting might be construed as exceeding the "fair use" permitted by copyright law.

"I would encourage everybody, think in terms of what your reader wants," he said. "These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."