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Newspaper Debate- Pay for Content The pay for content debate, which really is not a debate, it is about one side saying we are not making the money we did in the past so you the consumer is going to pay. The "we' is what they are thinking about and the "we" are not happy because they are losing control. Their reason for charging usually revolves around the argument, the news was never free (in the past) so consumers pay for it now. This argument is flawed in that the consumer never paid for the news, the newspaper maybe, but the news was paid for by advertisers. And the advertisers are leaving. The newspaper industry so wrapped up in its attempts to stave of the inevitable, has not taken note of a very important fact, it came into being because of technology, the printing press so long ago. Technology has now moved and one can only read with disbelief comments like, we will sue the search engines who steal our work, we want to stop the search engines linking to us, the newspapers. This to me indicates that grown people with kids in the newspapers industry have no idea how the web, linking, robots.txt and the search engines work. The inclusion of a line of code tells the search engines don't link to us (which the search engines obey) Any Judge should have no hesitation throwing out the case when the plaintiff has the solution themselves. But no doubt the industry will pursue the option as a drowning man will clutch at a straw Contact Firstsearch