By Denise Ouellet

If you use Google News, you’re probably used to seeing sponsored ads pop up on the right of your search screen. However, you may not have noticed that Google has now begun to insert ads at the bottom of hosted articles. The question now is whether the publishers will see any of this ad revenue.

Before, Google simply hosted the article with no ads but now, viewers are directed to other similar or related articles via links at the bottom of the hosted story. If users begin using Google News as a substitute for going to the original content provider’s site, this could mean less ad dollars for that site. There has been some speculation that this could lead to legal problem for Google as content providers suffer the loss of web traffic.

Recently, there has been similar tension between publishers themselves who used to be fine with one site using a hyperlinked quote from an original article in a related news story, that is, until viewers stopped clicking on that hyperlink. If users don’t visit the original article then that publisher also loses valuable ad dollars. As a remedy, publishers are trying to sue for copyright infringement.

While Google’s monetization of Google News is probably not covered by the Fair Use Doctrine, using quotes from an article to comment on them is typically protected. However, as these issues make their way through the courts, we may begin to see what online publishing means for Fair Use.