WTF?

What the fecking fick? The Tribune is responsible now? So digging for old news (which is basically stealing other people's work, btw), not checking them... right, obviously Google news and Bloomberg did the right thing, the Tribune is at fault. If you can't rely on blindly stolen work anymore... if I was writing for a newspaper, I'd bloody well expect to be able to put whatever I want in the paper without having to wonder how Mighty Google and Golden Bloomberg might misinterprete it after not reading it properly. 6 years later. Investors also could have checked, before chickenning.

That said, serves them UAL right. They are hopelessly incompetent anyway.

Why's it the papers fault?

hey, they had an article on their web site. that is 100% within their rights. Just because Google comes along and steals it without bothering to read it is not their problem.

Copyright date

What Copyright Date was shown on the bottom of the News Item? If it had been simply moved to a different URL it should surely still have had the original Copyright date on it.

Every journalist knows...

... check your sources. Nice to see further proof of the absence of journalism in the "blogosphere".

well known?

There is a well-known way to stop Google from indexing a site, called "robots.txt", an opt-out mechanism. Since newspapers are basically advertisers these days (whose lunch is being eaten by those with better business models), and advertisers are all about "opt out" rather than "opt in", I'd say this is a case of live by the sword, get cut by the sword.

The paper is at fault for not opting out in the first place. As for the deep-link argument, it's technically trivial to stop deep linking. So again, the paper's fault.

I say let them bear the brunt of the vitriol, just for being incompetent idiots.

If somebody is at fault

It's clearly the guy who decided this was newsworthy for the Bloomberg information system.

I do hope these guys will try to find more solid information than "some newspaper article on Google news". The people who are paying through the nose for Bloomberg information certainly expect more, at least.

Storm in a teacup

If the Tribunal is certainly in a bad position, given that they complain about spidering but do not take the measures to stop it, I think that the only people to blame are the speculators.

Personally I am convinced that the good one will have realized that UA was not in a position to go bankrupt. They will have followed the downward spiral, and started to buy shares when the price fell low enough.

Now that the overblown mistake is on its was to be corrected, these astute speculators will have sold for a profit (like the first commenter apparently did).

This simply validates the fact that Wall Street is not for the simple-minded idiots. It takes a steel nerve and a steady head to not flounder, and that is certainly for the best.

So I don't really care who the masses want to pin the blame on. The speculators that sold in a panic are the only ones to blame - and they have already paid the price.

That is the one good thing about speculating : the idiots always lose.

I fail to see why that should change.

Disclaimer : I have no stock of any kind.

Re: well known?

So basically you're saying that if you leave your front door unlocked and someone steals your stuff, they're not to blame, you are... nice 2.0 logic...

Greed is good, isn't it?

Since greed is the driver here: the greed of stockbrokers and other speculators. "First Mover advantage" means so much to them that they can't be bothered to check for artefacts of modern news channels like this. Well-known artefacts, since one of them is the perennial goat-marriage article on the beeb.

So, they're supposed to be experts on analysis and research, yet they forgot that UAL had filed for bamruptcy a little while back and even though there had been no rumblings about dire troubles in recent days, they went ahead and panic-sold.

I hope they weren't using automated processes; I'm sure there are rules about that these days...

Does anyone else find this hilarious?

Share prices and economics are completely arbitary constructs based on the whims and fears of a few shouty men in bad pinstripe suits.

They didn't check the facts, they got scared, they got stung.

Perhaps they're remember this next time they "lose confidence" in something for no good reason and plunge a country or two into recession. Like, ummmm, they just did.

Nobody should publish anything online! Ban websites!

How is it the Sun-Sentinel's fault? If I put an old newspaper clipping online about the Titanic saying "ship sunk - hundreds dead" and Google indexes that and there's a fall in share prices in shipping companies, who exactly is to blame?

Unless the newspaper had a contract with Google to provide content in a specific format and violated the terms of that contract, they did nothing wrong. Google News is a law to itself what stories it picks up and what it doesn't. Are people suggesting that the Sun-Sentinel shouldn't allow search engines to index their pages just in case the search engine puts the wrong date on them?

Google are at fault for misdating the story (if it has no date they shouldn't make one up). But mainly, dealers who sold shares based on a story they didn't properly read are at fault.

An American's read on the situation

Everyone claiming the Article was stolen from The Sentinel is bonkers. This isn't breaking into a locked house or even opening the unlocked but closed door on a house. Google followed the bright neon signs saying "Welcome Everybody in the World" onto the The Sentinel's pages. Disclaimers elsewhere don't invalidate the signs. The Sentinel can't not be using Google to try to drive internet users to it's website, so it can't be unaware of how Google works. If you are using Google, you agree to their rules.

Google: Probably ought to revisit its algorithms to see if they can prevent this sort of thing. Their publicly proclaimed motto is 'Do No Evil' and clearly sucker punching the price of an innocent airline (at least with respect to its current financial status) is evil. Still, their system is entirely automated based on what the pages their crawlers crawl. Therefore 10% responsibility.

The Sentinel: A new link on Most Popular to a hideously old news article smells too much of chumming the waters. You blew it and you were trying a slimy move when you blew it. Responsibility: 45%, but only because of the rest of my analysis and the fact that I can do my maths; by fairness you deserve 100% liability.

The Bloomberg: You are totally incompetent. You fed an unchecked internet article into the maw of stock broker reflex-sell/buy action. You even more than The Sentinel should be aware of the deletrious effects this would have on the market. Responsibility: Again 45% because I can do my maths; by fairness you deserve 150% liability because your behavior borders on the criminal.

Now, apply the principals of US civil liabilities provisions, by which each of you is assessed according to the matrix of you assigned liability, the damages inflicted on the plaintiff, and your ability to pay, you are each assessed $1 Billion in damages payable to United. Now all of you be off and never make that kind of mistake again.

Broken markets

"Maybe markets work *too* quickly, and this degree of responsiveness is a Bad Thing. Ergo, we should take away their computers, and send them back to trading with paper. Who would suffer?"

Damn straight they do. Wasn't it automatic trading that led to vivid amplification of the Black Monday collywobbles? Or was that a different Black Day? They put some timeouts on trades after one of those "crash"es, I recall.

For my money, any given share should be unsellable for a year. Then people would buy for investment in concerns that are actually going to work, rather than investing in bits of paper in the hope that other people will think that those bits of paper will sell for more money at some point (pretty soon). Heck, even making shares sit still for a month between sales would help start to curb some of the rampant excesses of the stockmarket.

But it won't happen because any stockmarket that slowed things down that far would stop having any stock to sell, because the traders would move to other bourses. And then the stockmarket owners would be out of pocket. And we can't have that, can we?

Any such move would have to be a worldwide one, and it's simply not going to happen, and we will remain at the mercy of the braying pigopolists in the red braces.

The news industry eats its own tail

The problem is that even a "conscientious" broker who checked the story would have seen it repeated in a number of places. The reporter's sources these days are, for the most part, other newspapers; give it a quick re-write to stave off plagarism claims, send it to copyediting, and hit the bar for an early lunch.

@Tom

"clearly sucker punching the price of an innocent airline (at least with respect to its current financial status) is evil"

This is not at all clear to me my friend.

Limited liability companies exist to do capital's dirty work. If you want me to feel sorry for your capital, take moral and legal responsibility for what it does.

Wrong analogy

Amazing the number of people who think a website is a private home. You're using the wrong analogy. Here is a more accurate one.

A website is a public space (like a store) into which anyone is invited. Not having a robots.txt is like not having a sign or enforcing a policy that says you can refuse service to anyone you want to. Not preventing deep links is like having one of several doors at the back of the store that the clients are welcome to go through, but one door they're not, then no putting a lock or a sign on the "employees only" door.

Getting angry when Google comes to visit is therefore the fault of the shop owner for not publishing or enforcing their policy of refusing service. You've invited the world, so it's up to the shop owner to make the exceptions, not for the world to try to read their fucking mind. Getting angry about deep links when you've done nothing to prevent them is just stupid when you've already invited people into your place of business and you WANT them there.

Comparing a public website to a private home makes no sense, given that you want people to visit the website. If not, why bother having the damn thing in the first place? A website is a place of business, like it or not, with everyone already invited. If you aren't going to make or enforce access policies, the owner of said website can certainly be blamed for people treating their public website as just that - a public website. If they don't want it public, put up a closed sign and lock the door.

Key point not analysed

I would've thought the key element is "A Florida investment firm (who obviously hadn't looked at the content of the story) wrote a one line summary that made its way onto Bloomberg business wire on Monday"

Investment firms need to take responsibility and ownership for the content they are publishing as investors will rely on it. This investment house clearly didn't do so, and hence were negligent.