Google, After Brussels: "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)"

Okay, how many Google attorneys can you fit on the head of a pixel? The growth in Google's Legal Department may soon be paralleling the hockey stick growth of its ad business.

Just last week, Google lost one court case, as a Belgian court decided that, non!, it couldn't take headlines and briefs from news sites, put them up on Google and share no revenue. The Belgian case brought by Copiepresse gives further mojo to Agence France Presse's case against Google, to be played out in a D.C. courtroom. In addition, the work of European consortium in putting together a more trackable news content tracking system -- ACAP -- all lead to the same set-to. 

News publishers want a better deal from Google.

Why is this important? Sources in and around Google News will tell you that of all those visitors coming to Google News --   8 million uniques in December -- only about 5% of them click through from the headlines/briefs to the originating news site. That would mean 95% stay in and around Google, satisfied with their news briefing -- just give me the top of it in one place, thank you.

In the U.S., there's been less litigation, though talk of it pervaded U.S. news company law offices on and off for years. Can they do that? Could we stop them? The grayness of the legal area has largely led news companies away from the courts and, haltingly, into the business of business development. There have been many discussion between news publishers and Google, Yahoo, MSN and other players. Certainly, the newspaper consortium deal with Yahoo on recruitment ads is a step toward a wider agreement on news content as well. And Google has already agreed to license AP content for a still-unspecified new product.

Heavens, Google wouldn't acknowledge that it can't take heads and briefs without paying for them.

"We have always explained that any licensing agreements Google does with content providers is for use that goes beyond indexing or referencing," Paris-based Google attorney, told the Times.

Mais, bien sur. As in the AP agreement, which has been shrouded in public grayness, it's clear that Google plainly saw it was side-stepping that legal indexing question by finding a way to push some money in the direction of AP.

Let's parse Googlespeak. What Google is really saying is, "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)".

Google plainly is not giving away the bank. A Wall Street Journal Wednesday article provided a great overview of all the legal issues Google is confronting from Viacom/YouTube to book publishing in the U.S. to news issues. Google backed away from a too-rich deal with Viacom. Viacom had apparently asked Google for a $1 billion guarantee against its provision of 100,000 videos. You know how these numbers get pitched. Legacy media strategizes how deep those Webby markets are, then multiplies by 2 or 3. Sometimes -- if the timing and the content is right -- they get pleasantly surprised. Rupert took in $900 million over three years, when he turned over MySpace ad space to Google. But that may have been a moment in cybertime.

Look for a continuing re-calibration of what Google (and Yahoo and MSN) will be willing to pay news and book publishers and video and audio producers.  That reckoning will depend on how cases wend through the courts, and on how willing publishers and producers are to get into bed with the channels of the day.

The question won't be largely settled in courts. It's all a matter of negotiation and re-negotiation of revenue shares over time. The court cases will only tell us how much pressure is on Google (+) to give content producers a better deal.

Publishers and producers are understandably wary. Google in particular is Syndication Squared. In indexing the world's knowledge and in growing the fastest-growing web ad business on the planet -- and then connecting the two -- it has the potential to be the largest syndicator on Planet Earth.  That's what it's about -- connecting content and advertising. And Google is in the center of it all, with Google Base still on the drawingboard.