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The story is 6 months old and there have been no updates from Appleaday since though there's been plenty of news stories about it. A good advertisement you say, hmmm.

Do you happen to live in Luxemburg? It might was a good ad for the local community there anyway

The story is 6 months old and there have been no updates from Appleaday since though there's been plenty of news stories about it. A good advertisement you say, hmmm.

Orignal story dates from the 5th of may (6 month old stories now Slashdot, really ?) There was a flurry of news reporting and no updates since then, not even on their Facebook page where the restaurant gleefully displayed its new found notoriety. So I'm guessing it turned out to be very much a non-story played up for advertising value.

Are you still reading newpapers? On the Web? Do you prefer watching news?

Personally, I m only reading newspaper on the web (http://www.lemonde.fr http://www.liberation.fr/ http://www.lalibre.be/ http://www.lesoir.be/ and less http://www.lefigaro.fr/ http://www.letemps.ch./ Even if people describes me to be more on the right (for Belgium, translate as communist in the USA :) ), i prefer leftish newspaper. But I like to be able to read different point of view and then make an opinion about myself. Still i find the quality of the writing to be weaker than before. If you now a subject well, you see obvious errors.

Now, i still buy 2 papers every month : "le monde diplomatique" (in http://mondediplo.com/) and "foreign affairs" ( http://www.foreignaffairs.com/) both are very interessing and they are following high standard, I also read the Economist from time to time. I wouldnt want to read them on the web because each article is quite dense and asl myself to focus on it. I would like to have the same depth into classical newpaper but alas :(.

I think Democracy needs Journalism. In democracy, voters must vote for the best candidate. And how would you do without knowing? I think that both Education and Information need to be analyse in the light of how good they are to Democracy

To come back to the proposition, I think is not neccesaraly wrong, this could allow some smaller publication to exist and that will bring more diversity where before the News Conglomerate were tending to uniformity.

In Belgium, at least one company does this with simple mobile phone signal, no additional software to download: http://www.be-mobile.be/ Example in a national newspaper: http://trafic.lesoir.be/?act=infotraf (only tick "Bouchon" if you only want to see traffic jams ; colours show mean speed of cars). Of course, nobody never sign anything about using their phone signal to something else than making and receiving phone calls. Providers just did it without the consumer consent. And nobody said anything. That's Belgium ...

In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1260 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.

Maybe not everything is as easy as it would seem at first. "robots.txt" is opt-out, not opt-in, as has been remarked in previous posts on this matter. When concerning spam, everybody on slashdot will reject 'opt-out'. Well, I can understand that some news company might feel the same for Google News usage of their content. Sure, this time, they could reject them. Then Microsoft Live will come. They could reject it. Then thousands others, and you'll have a real problem, not being able to reject/select those that you wish, and those that you don't, and still allowing individuals to access the site.

In addition, I could imagine that if communication is as bad inside those Belgian newspapers as it is in a lot of companies, the IT wasn't aware of what the legal department did. Some of the incoherent moves made by those newspapers seem to show that (If I remember well, they had Google ads here http://www.lalibre.be/)

Also, it's been explained at least on one "official blog" of one of those newspaper (in French: http://blog.lesoir.be/blog-du-sel/?p=14#comment-15 ), that at first Google didn't want to negotiate with them, at all, before being sued. Well, now, they took notice.

Being the mega-corp that it became, I could imagine that Google wanted to ignore a small country. Nobody like arrongants people, and the nice "do no evil" Google seems from day to day to turn slowly into a arrogant mega-corp. I suppose that's a consequence of being on the stock exchange, and having to justify yourself to stock holders.

http://www.lesoir.be/robots.txt

The problem was that the newssite of French and German speaking Belgium had articles indexed by google (I believe it's about Le Soir), and that didn't pose any problem.

They changed the way the articles were accessible and made a "pay to view"-service, yet google had cached the newsarticles offering them "for free" (as the previously were offered publicly for free)

The problem for them was in how Google had a cache of something that wasn't free anymore, violating their copyright.

The link to the article on vrtnieuws as a Belgian newssite is misleading as vrtnieuws is a Flemish (Dutch speaking) newssite. In the audio fragment the interviewer wonders wherever it's not "good publicity" to have google link to your content and the specialist agrees with that how newssites "like" that, but explains the articles didn't link back to the website to the updated or removed content which posed the problem: their content being cached, freely accessable when they charged for it, and no link back to their webpage.

As the texts are in french, here are the interesting points about this story :

1. There are not one but MULTIPLE lawsuits on that matter in France. The lawsuit ruled this june was brought by the "Consommation Logement et Cadre de Vie" (CCLV) association against EMI. There are pending lawsuits against sony and BMG. Then there is another french consumers association ("UFC Que Choisir") who sued EMI France, Warner France, Universal Pictures Video, Fnac and Auchan (the two latter are distributors).

2. The court just tested CDs of ONE artist and constated they could not be READ by some devices although the system was stated to prevent COPY.

3. The ruling stated that EMI had one month to put a label on that CD stating : "Warning, this CD cannot be read on every reader or autoradio".

4. EMI appealed.

5. the judgement is on this site.

6. Another article about the situation in Belgium where I read that an asshole from IFPI says "there is only 4 to 8 complains for 10 thousand CD" so it is not a problem. Lawsuit coming ...

Belgian on-line media is also covering the events :

Le Soir (in french)
La Libre Belgique
De Standaard (in dutch).

Also in french :
Le Monde

-DZM