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Re:Something really scary is going on in Germany by jamesbritt on Thursday December 06, 2012 @05:42PM (#4884296)
[C]ontent of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized.

I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there.

If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent.

People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash.

But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?

It' perhaps something to consider, but it has to be a consensual act, where the value is negotiated. Google may already be providing commensurate value by driving traffic to a site.

Re:Something really scary is going on in Germany by czr80 on Thursday December 06, 2012 @06:37PM (#4884508)
If it had zero value why would Google be interested in it?
Re:Something really scary is going on in Germany by dasil003 on Thursday December 06, 2012 @11:59PM (#4885551)
Google's value is in its comprehensiveness. Both the marginal value and cost to maintain a single piece of content in their index is extremely close to zero.
Re:Something really scary is going on in Germany by derleth on Thursday December 06, 2012 @07:58PM (#4884871)
> If it had zero value why would Google be interested in it?

Again, value is subjective. Even if you think it has zero value, even if every engineer at Google thinks it has zero value, it might have value to someone out there. If nothing else, it could be a part of a corpus linguistics study.