Google News in perpetual, lawyer-induced beta

As a sort of follow-up to my recent post on Google News, Wired has the answer …

As a sort of follow-up to my recent post on Google News, Wired has the answer to a question that has been nagging me for about two years now: why is Google News still in beta? The answer appears to be lawsuits.



The article goes on to detail how Google not only faces IP-related challenges here in the US, but the international IP regime that we've been actively working to force on the rest of the world has made other countries hostile territory for Google News, as well.

What I would love to see is an attempt by Google to use Europe's new database copyright laws, which extend IP protection to specific collections of publicly available facts, to argue for the company's right to profit from their news aggregation service. That way, whoever won, everyone would still lose!

Oh, and on an unrelated note, I must link this headline from the Times of India. I, uh, don't quite know what to say.

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