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  3. In 2009 Rupert Murdoch called Google and other search engines "content kleptomaniacs". Now cash-strapped newspapers want to put

In 2009 Rupert Murdoch called Google and other search engines "content kleptomaniacs". Now cash-strapped newspapers want to put

admin2014-06-25  79
问题     In 2009 Rupert Murdoch called Google and other search engines "content kleptomaniacs". Now cash-strapped newspapers want to put legal pressure on what they see as parasitical news aggregators. In Germany politicians are considering a bill to extend copyright protection to excerpts of newspaper articles appearing in search engines’ results.
    Giving away the headline and first sentence of an article supposedly dissuades readers from clicking through to the newspaper’s website to read the entire story. Critics also say that lifting even snippets of articles means Google can sell advertisements alongside them on its search platform(though Google News carries no ads). But the benefit goes the other way, too. Google says it directs 4 billion clicks to news websites every month; perhaps as much as three-quarters of Google News users go on to read the full article. And newspapers can add a tag to their pages so that they do not appear in Google News.
    German lawmakers will start to discuss the bill this month, and it could pass next spring. Newspapers will then probably join forces to set up a collecting society, rather as the music industry collects royalties on songs.
    Google has said that having to pay for articles could "threaten its very existence". But its most likely response would be to remove pages from newspaper sites in the countries concerned from its search results. That would hit media outlets that depend on search-engine traffic to boost their revenues from online adverts. Even Mr Murdoch, who pulled his newspapers from Google’s search results in 2010, decided in September that headlines and teaser text from the articles should reappear.
    Newspapers are claiming that copyright law is on their side. America’s laws are more relaxed than most of Europe’s, so search engines’ use of some material from articles qualifies there as "fair use". But in Belgium a group of newspapers sued Google for news copyright infringement and won.
    The real issue behind all this, however, is the decline of traditional media. Even if some countries do get Google to pay up for using their headlines and some text from articles, it will hardly plug the holes in their newspapers’ revenues, or speed their restructuring. Jan Malinowski, a media expert at the Council of Europe, says trying to get Google to pay for articles "is like trying to ban Gutenberg’s printing press in order to protect the scribes".
    The legal pressure may in any case be overtaken by changes in business models. Newspapers have mostly avoided charging users for reading articles in the hope of boosting visitor numbers to their websites. But thinking is shifting. The emerging business model is now the metered paywall: a few free articles tempt readers, but they must pay if they want more. Paywalls have doubled in America this year. Such idea may work better than hoping for a cheque from Google.
In Malinowski’s opinion, Newspapers’ effort is______.
选项 A、rewarding
B、impractical
C、admirable
D、illegal
答案B
解析 第六段前两句指出，即便对搜索引擎征收版税，也无法使报业摆脱困境。随后引出Malinowski的话“试图向谷歌收费就像试图禁止使用古腾堡的印刷机来保住抄写员的饭碗一样”作为例证证明以上观点，[B]选项正确。
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