Google announced back in June that they will release a news-content licensing program that will pay publishers for high-quality content for a brand new ‘news experience’ released later this year. According to Google, this initiative is going to have “an enhanced storytelling experience that lets people go deeper into more complex stories.” Germany, Brazil and Australia […]

Users are now being allowed to report counterfeit goods within the organic Google search results for removal. This is similar to the DMCA process, which lets you request removal of stolen copyrighted content from Google’s search results. Google Ads already prohibits counterfeit goods from being advertised on Google and it describes them as goods that “contain a trademark or […]

After an extensive public debate last year, the European Parliament passed a sweeping new Copyright Directive that was very controversial. This directive was intended to both harmonize and modernize EU copyright law, as well as generate licensing revenue for authors and publishers from big internet companies like Facebook and Google. The first country in the […]

Earlier this week, Google was accused of stealing lyrics from Genius, a song lyrics web site without proper licensing agreement. In response to those accusations, Google said that it “licenses the lyrics text from third parties” and does “not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics” in a blog post on Tuesday. Even then, […]

The European Union’s debated Copyright Directive is ready to become law.  There has been an agreement on the final language of the Directive, and all that is required now is the formal European Parliament and member-state approval, which is expected to happen. The idea behind the Directive is that it will govern copyright rules across Europe.  It […]

A highly restrictive copyright directive has been backed by the European Parliament that is intended to benefit traditional European news publishers and copyright holders at the possible expense of user-generated content and U.S. internet companies, such as Google.  Back in July, an early version of the directive was rejected. In order for the new rules to […]

The GDPR is now in effect, and on its heels is the proposed EU copyright reform for US technology companies.  The pending legislation would take the disastrous “link tax” approach applied in Germany and Spain across the whole of Europe. The idea behind this legislation is to harmonize copyright laws across Europe.  The European Commission wants to fix the fragmented set of laws and enforcement rules […]

Judge Katherine Forrest of the federal court in New York, ruled on a motion that found that embedding a tweet containing a copyrighted photo (of Tom Brady) could create liability for copyright infringement. the case is still in process (Goldman vs. Breitbart) and can’t be appealed until final. The ruling has potentially far-reaching implications as she […]

In an announcement made late last week, Google parent Alphabet and Getty Images made a sweeping partnership that ended a long-standing copyright antitrust dispute between Getty and Google, which was filed in early 2016. This deal was characterized by Getty as “a multi-year global licensing partnership, enabling Google to use Getty Images’ content within its various products and services.” […]

When it comes to headlines, if you’ve been using a single headline to serve multiple audiences, then you’be been missing out on some opportunities for key optimization.  In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand gives you a process for writing headlines for SEO, social media and website visitors, each custom-tailored to its audience and optimized […]