I take it you have the copyright holders permission to use the Gary Larson cartoon on your page:
http://lancewiggs.com/2010/02/16/why-xt-keeps-failing/

No? Shame on you!

That said, I reckon Google News is much like regular Google Search…just limited to the small set of authoritative sources and ordered by recency. They only display a sentence or two of any article so if someone wants to actually consume the content they have to click through to the original source.

I think it would be fine if jobs.org.nz linked directly rather than through their own permalinks which are creating a destination page for each individual article. There’s no reason to have your own permalinks unless you want to create lots of pages in the hope of generating search traffic and page views (that’s the copyright owners priviledge).

I wonder how many of the sources listed in Google News ask to be removed. My guess is not many for the same reason not many people opt out of the Google search index.

I did a blog post here: http://www.dylanbland.com/?p=221

As business starts to move into social networking, arguments over who owns what and who can use it are going to be at the forefront of legal development of copyright/IP. Its happening all over the place – domain names, #s92A music and film p2p ripoffs, webscraping, satire and parody etc etc. This is not new on the web though – to misquote John Perry Barlow (http://bit.ly/8b4HH) its old wine in new bottles. Actually reminds me of the framing and deeplinking wars of a decade ago and has the same issues.

FWIW, Lance, I think your approach is right. How can we test the limits of what should and should not be allowed if we don’t, well … test the limits by staking a claim first. All very well to say that you know an elephant when you see it but that is not that helpful when you are trying to decide in advance what is allowed.

Google news uses a very short snippet and they link to the original story directly, both from their site and from their RSS feed. It is about discovery.

Conversely jobs.org.nz, while also using a snippet (I’d say too long), doesn’t link directly, instead they have a permalink for each of the posts they syndicate, and these all have comments enabled…which means they are potentially appropriating your audience (unlikely I know, but the intent is clearly there). As you would expect from a WordPress powered site they also link back to themselves from their RSS feed.

Particularly considering the use of Adsense it seems to me the intent of jobs.org.nz is clearly different from Google News. Where Google news is about discovery (like the search box), jobs.org.nz is using your content in the hope that they’ll generate natural search traffic on your content and then monetize it with Adsense.

Without Adsense anymore I wonder what the motivation will be to maintain the site as it is?