BRAZILIAN NEWSPAPER EDITORS LEADING THE ATTACK TO GOOGLE AND YAHOO!

Via Brazil News Net I read today in Lisbon this news from Sao Paulo:

"The Brazilian press knows it is not going to be a walk in the park, but this is not preventing it from taking on Internet search giants like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

What the owners of newspapers in Brazil want is their share of the billions those companies get for indexing all the content, news and opinion pieces, they produce day in and day out at high cost.

It was the just-reelected president of Brazil's Newspapers National Association (ANJ), Nelson Sirotsky, who announced at the closing of the 6th Brazilian Newspapers Congress that he is going to try to engage in a dialogue with Brazilian and international search engine companies.

Sirotsky is not talking about any lawsuit at the moment, but he isn't discounting this possibility either. Another item disclosed by the ANJ's honcho is that his association will soon start a program to raise the interest of school children in reading newspapers.

According to Sirotsky, what the Internet search companies are doing is embezzlement since they are presenting material they didn't produce themselves and then fraudulently keeping money that doesn't belong to them. Sirotsky doesn't want, however, to close these indexing services as long as they share the money they are making with the content producers."

EXPRESSO announced this week the opposite strategy: the IMPRESA Group, the leading media company of Portugal is ready to sign an agreement with Google.

My feeling is that the confrontation will not help newspapers.

The Google's and Yahho's of the world need us as partners not as competitors.

I will give you more details in the next few days.