If You Think Google Takes Advantage Of You....

You can always block Googlebot from your site.

In a move aimed at helping newspapers generate new revenue from struggling online operations, the German government intends to require search engines and other Internet companies to pay publishers whose content they highlight....

The proposal was cheered by German publishers, who complain that Internet companies like Google have profited hugely from their content, while generating only scraps of digital revenue.

“In the digital age, such a right is essential to protect the joint efforts of journalists and publishers,” the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers said, adding that it was “an essential measure for the maintenance of an independent, privately financed news media.”

The proposed policy is directed at all search engines and aggregator sites, not just Google, but it's really the bottom line of the big players that has some publisher openly salivating.

It's a fair response that a copyright holder shouldn't have to insert code into its content saying, "Please don't index this," but only to a point. If the companies at issue weren't already profiting from the traffic generated by Google, whether in money or prestige, they are all sophisticated enough to exclude their content from Google's sites and simply do without the web traffic.