Google is buying its way out of lawsuits

Google has decided to throw a few bones to  media companies. Instead of getting sued for sending traffic to news sites, Google will pay media companies for sending traffic to their sites.

Such a deal!

Google has settled the lawsuit by Agence France-Presse, which was irate that Google posted headlines, news summaries and photos, plus links to the sites so you can read the whole story. Google already agreed to pay AP for the privilege last August.

Now I know that Donna Bogatin thinks Google is just stealing news from others and making money off that news through some mysterious, unspecified means (Google does NOT run ads on Google News. It seems to think this is just a good service for people interested in news. Go figure.)

But I'm dumb. I just don't understand the complaint. I like reading news, and I use Google to find it. Google's snippets tell me where to find news I'm interested and then--surprise!--I go to the sites where the news originated and put up with their ads.

That's how I found the Fox News article I linked to above.

It also seems to me that I've seen lots of TV commercials advertising  newspapers and news programs, and in each of them, they show headlines, snippets and photos.

I hope the broadcasters are paying those news services for the privilege of running those ads.

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