Scotland's Sunday Herald recently reported that Google has entered into secret deals with unnamed UK news organizations for the rights to use their material on Google News. According to the paper, "It now seems that Google has accepted it has lost the argument over carrying stories without paying for them." That would be a shocking about-face—if it's true.
A Google spokesperson tells Ars that the story is not true and that the company hasn't yet been able to contact the reporter who wrote it. "We have not changed our approach to Google News," said the spokesperson. "We believe Google News is legal. We index the content of thousands of news sources online. When users go to Google News, they see only headlines, snippets and image thumbnails from the relevant news articles. If people want to read the story, they must click through links in our results to the original web site."
Google does pay for the ability to use news content in ways that extend beyond fair use, though. After the Agence France-Presse sued Google over the news service, Google signed a deal with AFP to use its content in more ways. A similar deal was struck with the Associated Press. Google says that these deals give it the ability to "go beyond the limited uses permitted by copyright laws."
Google has repeatedly denied that the deals have anything to do with the legality of Google News, and it has aggressively defended its actions in court (though it lost in Belgium after it was sued by a coalition of newspapers there).
The Sunday Herald report gives almost no details, and it lists no sources, making it difficult to evaluate what's really going on here. It could well be that Google has signed new deals in the UK, but these would likely be equivalent to the AP and AFP deals it has already signed rather than a total capitulation to the idea that it must pay for headlines and snippets of news. Google, which has far too much to lose from such a policy, would never make such an admission: it's one that could open Google (and other search engines) up to lawsuits from just about every entity indexed by the company's search engine.
