The New York Times says Google is the top target here — which is confusing, because Google licenses the AP newswire and hosts its articles on its own site (such as this story about the earthquake in Italy — don't sue us, Dean!).

The AP's own statement doesn't clarify matters much. But it sounds like the AP, which is a cooperative owned by 1,400 U.S. newspapers, wants to go after Google and other online headline aggregators for misuse of all of its members' stories, not just wire copy. From the AP's press release on the move:

The Associated Press Board of Directors today announced it would launch an industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online....

As part of the initiative, AP will develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used. AP President Tom Curley said the initiative would also include the development of new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news.

Did the AP really just say that it wanted to come up with a competitor to Google News? That's hilarious — especially considering how, for any given AP story, you'll find hundreds of identical copies online — posted by all of its paying customers, including newspapers and TV and radio stations. We can't wait to hear Singleton presiding over a meeting to decide which member's website gets the top link. It's all kind of ridiculous, since Google only recently started selling advertising on Google News, and directs massive amounts of traffic to newspaper websites.

(Photo by AP)

Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. If Larry and Sergey plan to share anything more than links with the newspapers whose headlines it displays in Google News, they haven't signaled their intentions.

Good on them! If the newspapers had ever been even a tenth as cynical, opportunistic, and clever about exploiting their product and finding new advertisers as Google has, they wouldn't be in this mess. Instead of condemning Google of "stealing" their content, newspapers should be grateful that someone's making a pie — of which they can now ask for their fair share.

For example: A search for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on Google contains an ad for a DVD of Bartz's speeches. Can you imagine a newspaper salesforce thinking to solicit that ad, let alone running it in a timely fashion? There's a host of potential advertisers like that whom the newspaper industry has never tapped.

We're no doubt going to hear a lot of newspaper grandees groan that, like Apple in the music industry, Google will capture most of the profits from the online sale of their product. Did it ever occur to them that Apple might be reaping more of those profits because consumers think the portable convenience of the iPod and the one-click simplicity of iTunes have more value than the time-filling music itself?

Unlike the record industry, though, which for a good couple of decades had an enormously successful distribution medium in the CD, the newspapers have never come up with an electronic version of the news that is at once profitable for them and popular with consumers. Their websites are at once too large to shut down and too small to sustain them. The only newspapers seriously considering pay-to-read schemes are also-ran operations like Newsday. The right answer is embracing new sources of traffic (and hence revenue) like Google News — not shutting them off.

A few publishers understand this — generally outcasts like Dean Singleton, who's widely hated by his employees for cutting costs, and who recently killed one of his own by having his scrappy Denver Post outlast the Rocky Mountain News, which printed its final edition today. "The Internet world is a very competitive world," Singleton told the Times. "We don't have to let them take our content. We let them do so because it drives traffic." He's right: If the newspapers withdraw their headlines from Google News, scrappy Internet publications will gleefully replace them. To newspaper publishers who grew up with virtual local monopolies, this thought just doesn't occur.

Publishers should be rejoicing that Google is trying to make money off their headlines. At least someone is.

The Google cofounders, according to Thomasson, "replaced all notions of God's truth by worshiping money as god." Also, the company makes fun of Easter and prefers "pagan-type holidays." Of course, no one seems to have told the CCF's Webmaster — the screenshot from CCF's page on current issues surrounding marriage in California asks users to search Google News for the latest updates on heathen abominations.
(Photo by AP/Steve Yeater, via Mangoes)

Because last year, Tribune CEO Sam Zell asked Google to quit indexing and displaying headlines or pay up. How should Google have responded? By telling the IT guys at the Sun-Sentinel to edit the robots.txt file on the server that would presumably stop the Googlebot in its tracks. (Photo by AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)

It really boiled down to a bunch of people believing something they read on the Internet. In other words, Google and Bloomberg are seen as trusted sources. Google sells itself as more trustworthy because there are no editorial decisions made by humans on the news site — when of course, like Bloomberg's syndication practices, it's just that much cheaper to maintain. What neither of them have solved is the entire problem with the mechanization of information distribution: Garbage in, garbage out.

The online giant figures that Google News funnels readers over to the main Google search engine, where they do searches that do produce ads. And that’s a nice business. Think of Google News as a $100 million search referral machine.

What neither Mayer nor Fortt explained: The real reason why Google doesn't put ads on Google News. That's because it fears lawsuits from the media organizations whose headlines and text it picks up and republishes. (It's already lost a court case brought by a newspaper group in Belgium). By not running ads on Google News, Google lawyers could argue it's not profiting from their work.

Mayer just shot a $100 million hole in that argument. When she puts a number on how much money Google News makes for her employer, she gives newspapers' lawyers a big, fat, juicy reason to demand a cut of the business. Sure, the newspapers already make money from the traffic Google sends their way — but do you think, given a $100 million prize, they won't try to double-dip?

Here's a suggestion: When Google finishes calculating their legal bill, they should dock it from Mayer's pay. As an early Google employee with a net worth estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars and a penthouse apartment in the Four Seasons San Francisco, she can afford it.

Important to note here, but resoundingly ignored, is that this isn't a lawsuit about headlines or thumbnails or linking, as the Google News/Perfect 10/Belgian newspaper lawsuits were. Moreover is accused of commercially using full-length AP stories without any sort of payment.

Kristen Nicole at Mashable has a post typical of this kind of misreading. She titles her story "AP Sues Viacom for Linking. Hello... It's the Internet!" Moreover is owned by VeriSign, not Viacom. She then goes on to talk about how this has already been settled by the courts and that "linking" is fair use and perfectly acceptable. Yes, Kristen, linking is fair use, but that's not what this lawsuit is about.

(Disclosure: Nick Denton, owner of Valleywag's publisher, Gawker Media, was a cofounder of Moreover.)