Slashdot Mirror
Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper
CaVi writes "Following a judicial action (link in French) by the 'French-speaking Belgian Association of the press,' Google.be has removed all the French-speaking press sites from its index, as can be seen by doing a search. The court order to Google is posted at Chilling Effects.
In summary, the editors want a cut of the profit that Google News makes using their information. No such deal exists for the moment. Google has been ordered to remove all references, or pay one million Euros per day if it doesn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google's search. Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN? Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?" There's also a link to a Dutch news article on the subject; one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself, so rather then linking to the newspaper, Google was displaying it on their own.
No linking. Gotta love it. Undermind the damn net! Undermine I say!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So google is sued for displaying content no longer available? Thus making the 3rd party source "less needed". Too bad the common american worker can't get together and sue big corporations for outsourcing jobs, thus making the american worker "less needed". Lets start a class action suite.
riiight
Someone "out there" is taking the piss, right? I once visited Belgium for three weeks and it became apparent quite quickly that there wasn't anything news-worthy going on. All they seem to have is really, really excellent beer.
I am more concerned with the over inclusion of "news" sites. The news feature on Google has been flooeded with blogs and other "new" media sources. I enjoy reading blogs, but they are often so scewed to the blogger's opinion that they need some additional context. I realize that mainstream media is often accused of bias as well, but at least I know who those stations are. The news feature is useless to me if I need to get past 200 blogs to find one legitimate source.
Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian
Well, I doubt all Belgian language entries in Google were removed, especially since the summary said only the French speaking press in Belgium was removed. The question next is how big is the French speaking press in Belgium? I'm not an expert on Belgium, so I can't really say, but if it would like removing the English-speaking press in America, it may actually be a good thing :)
By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average /.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.
Google should block the Newspaper's IP addresses so that their reporters cannot use Google in their research.
As the old challenge goes, name 10 famous Belgians. Nice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.
Maybe its the start of something, all really dull places will sue to have their very dull news removed. After all, if something interesting happens there then one of the majors will cover it.
$1m a day... nice sense of perspective.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Excellent suggestion. Imagine? Reciprocity...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Using the same logic as described here, I could probably sue Google for some GPL violations.
Some web sites incorrectly send all their contents as text/plain or text/html, including binary files, images, etc. It looks like Google tries to automatically correct this, but is not always successful (this may depend on the amount of plain text contained in the binary file). Anyway, regardless of the reason why it happens, it seems to be possible to find a few binary files in the Google cache (not easy, but possible if you are lucky). And now comes the problem if one of these files is protected by the GPL: if Google distributes the binary file but not the sources, they would be violating the GPL.
Who is going to start a frivolous lawsuit against Google for GPL violations?
-Raphaël
Most likely the affected people are simply going to use google.fr instead, which appears to still list the sites.
What does "As can be seen by doing a search" mean? When I click the link I see lots of results from the site - I assumed that there were no results to be expected. Don't tell me the newspapers caved in so early...
Belguim is irrelevant anyway. Now that we can't find it through Google, it will quietly disappear in the back of the wardrobe, lost between Tanganyika and Cluj-Napoca.
Syncerus
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
Stupid Flanders...
End transmission.
I think not for Google. It is funny.. that the newspapers don't keep their content, but are offended when somebody else picks up the ball for them.
In reality, there is value to keeping articles around, and I really wish that newspapers would take the initiative and do a better job with that.
Regardless, this is unfortunate. Perhaps the companies should just keep the articles around... and then they could make all this "money that google is making from the articles" for themselves.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
This is not entirely clear, but it seems Google is abusing their near monopoly on search to strong arm their position in a new market of News.
Their have been ordered to remove other peoples news from their news service, and have decided to additional punish the source by also removing them from the search index.
I really thing Google should be allowed to link any news together in a news service, but escalating the issue to searching is really abusive and something I am quite sure they will be punished for in Europe. (Besides the obvious fact that it IS EVIL).
Serve me up some Freedom Waffles, Americans have had enough of those snooty Belgians!
-- listen to interesting music, support independent radio... WPRB
If you'd be a follower of the Vlaams Belang, I wouldn't be surprised at all... (For those who don't know what I mean, it's a very popular political party in Dutch speaking part of Belgium that is based on racism and hate of anyone who is not Vlaams speaking (Dutch language spoken in 60% of belgium), including their "french speaking" compatriots)...
Would those have strawberries, whipped cream, and blueberries?
I want some.
by the European court. Heck, it violates freedom of speech in essence. And, more importantly, linking/quoting has been proven to be not illegal in previous cases in the EU. Either they are all wrong, or the belgians are wrong. In my case, I come from the Netherlands, we know the answer ;=)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
at least i live in the states, where you can't just sue companies because you are too dense to learn the rules (such as robots.txt)
oh wait..
-- lol pwned
If every Fleming who thinks Wallonia is a crappy socialist hellhole was a follower the VB, the VB would have a complete majority by now.
The bottom line is that any creative work is copyrighted such that only the "author" can authorise copies. Google is depending on authors not enforcing their rights against them to prevent them from making numerous copies (and from providing a service to provide those copies to anyone with Google cache). If I was to setup a site which simply allowed visitors to search (and download) all the binaries online would Linus/FSF/Microsoft not be justified in challenging me for illegally distributing their copyrighted works?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt
If I understand this correctly, the principal problem is not Google News but rather Google Cache. It seems that when news articles move from public to subscriber-only, Google retrieved the contents from its cache, instead of removing the article. So the issue was that Google was distributing articles instead of only linking them.
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.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
The biggest joke of the whole affair is that these newspapers apparently never heared about a robots.txt file and neither did the 'expert' that adviced the court in this matter. If I were google I'ld setup a little farm that would visit every single page on their website every millisecond, just to make sure that the moment the newspaper takes an article offline it gets removed from google cache as well. :o)
...greed is the great destroyer.
Yes, but the poster makes an important point. google.be is blocking the sites, but google.com is not. google.fr is not either.
.fr instead. It would be different if Google were removing lesoir.be and other sites from all searches (including google.com searches) by computers with Belgian IP addresses, but are they? If not, Belgians will probably switch to google.fr/.com rather than MSN.
.be. Could it be because .be servers are actually in Belgium, and thus are somehow legally affected? That's the only way I can think of that this block makes sense.
It seems like the block has no practical effect, since you can find everything by going to google.com or
I don't know why they did this for
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
Agreed - editors are the one thing why sites like slashdot are worthwhile compared with digg. If you only want to read random shit written by monkeys digg is unbeatable, slashdot should be different
I still see "La Libre Belgique" a french speaking newspaper
But when I do this: http://news.google.be/news?ned=fr_beIt's not there anymore.
Guess what Belgians will do next? BTW there is no such thing as Belgian waffles, Canadian Bacon, or Filet Americain. Right about the beer though!Why? Chances are if Google's cache contains a link to the binary; Google also has a link to the source.
You mean I can't read earth-shattering news exclusively put on french-speaking, .be domains anymore? Whatever will we do now? Dear Jesus.. how will I survive when such a huge part of the internets has been torn away? How many tubes are left, oh harsh harsh world?
In all seriousness, I didn't know the french-speaking press of the Belgian world was so damn stupid. Most of their traffic probably comes from people accidentally clicking on links from google. Why would they do this? Money?
That's like kidnapping Dubya in Egypt and asking the Arabs for a ransom.
Quite a language you got there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian [sic]?
Or will Belgium become irrelevant on Google?
So say we all
thats it! no more belgian chocolate for me! no more money for these belgian burgersmeisters
I'm from Belguim, too but at least I can take a fucking joke!!
Just to clarify, the Flemish speaking region (Flanders)that vrt servers (it's actually the state broadcaster) is in Belgium, so I don't see the confusion caused by calling it a Belgian news service, unless you doubt the existence of Belgium (and let's not get in to that here).
I'm going over here and I don't know why!
I've started using RSS feeds instead of going to multiple sites for my news. I don't want to rely on a single outlet for my news, and at the same time, I would like to be able to choose which feeds I get. I just go to my rss reader and grab all the feeds I want.
Google will not become irrelavant, if they are smart, because they have an online rss reader - Google Reader. It's still under "Google Labs", but if they started pushing this service where the news organizations are not allowing them. They could still pick up the ad revanue, and with less effort on their part.
Great! At least one brave soul spottted the actual gist of the matter!
Leffe, anyone?
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Apparently, they have ordered these large fines thanks to the attitude of Google.
;"
;"
;"
For example, google wasn't present in court and they didn't collaborate at all in the investigation.
So the newspapers won by default. Google "indifferent" attitude apparently annoyed the court, so they basically granted the demands of the newspaper.
For some reason that part isn't translated in the english version of the court document, but here it is (in French - quoted from the court documents) and a rough translation, done by myself, follows each quotes:
1."Attendu que le tribunal de céans ne manque pas d'être
surpris par l'attitude de la défenderesse qui n'a pas jugé utile
de participer à' la mission d'expertise, malgré les invitations
qui lui avaient été adressées par l'expert judiciaire, et qui ne
comparaît pas
Translation:
The court is surprised by the attitude of the defendant which hasn't
found useful to participate in the expert evaluation[...]and who
aren't present in court.
2."Attendu que cette attitude constitue une indication de ce que
les craintes que nourrit la demanderesse sur la mauvaise
volontk que mettra à la d4fenderesse à s'exécuter pourraient
être fondées
Translation:
This attitude is an indication that the fears of the plaintiff
about the bad faith of the defendant might be justified.
3."Que l'attitude de la défenderesse est d'autant plus
surprenante que dans d'autres pays, cettes plus importants
que la Belgique, la défenderesse s'est engagée dans des
négociations avec les 4diteurs de journaux pour résoudre la
question du respect des droits d'auteur
Translation:
That the attitude of the defendant is more so surprising
that in other countries, certainly bigger than Belgium,
the defendant had been negociating with newspapers editors to
solves the copyrights and intellectual properties issues.
Also, the court order isn't just about the Soir Libre newspaper, but about all newspapers editors, journalists, etc represented by cafepresse.
First of all : it is pretty complex to explain our Belgian laws to you.. but I'll try! If you read the complete text there are several important points : - first of all Google wasn't in the courtroom to defend themselves, this leaves a whole procedure open for them to react. (but do they care?) - your robot.txt makes no sense here, that's an opt-out. In Belgium everything has to be opt-in. - all newspapers are strong entities in Belgium, nobody searches them in Google, everyone just types the newspaper name, followed by .be
- the main argument was brought to the judge by a court expert. They
did some tests by removing articles on some newspaper websites (for example : wrong info,
re-edited articles) but Google News would still show them.
This is a major issue here. You have to know we have a special database law (1992)
in Belgium. This law prohibits the commercial use, non-commercial transaction of databases
between entities and.. the creation of a database (whatever data) without the explicit knowledge
of those who are "databased"..
For the judge it was clear that Google made a "database" of the articles - so case closed.
(although i think "google cache" is not the same as "a database")
As a Belgian I'm proud we have the strongest privacy laws in the world (really, study them..),
but the database law is now used in a copyright infringement suit.
(where in the past, it was mainly used to protect individuals)
Besides of all these things : we still are slammed with arguments like "google making money with the news".
But everyone can see there are no ads on news.google.be
For your info : the flemish part of the belgian newspapers just asked
Google not to be indexed, and Google had no problem with that.
In my opinion and after reading the verdict several times,
Google would win the case with just a 0 sec. cache
If nothing happens in Belgium - why did Caesar call us the bravest?
Score:-1, Offtopic? My ass! The poster above has a very good point (and I am not he). The summary is very disjointed and difficult to read. Offtopic huh? Bullshit, its exactly on topic. Where else was he supposed to post that obseravtion, in another thread? Quit sucking slashass, moderators or you're going to suck the colon right out of them, then what will you do?
Everone knows that Belgium doesn't exist...
I initially thought it might've been misleading as to identify vrtnieuws as the newssite having filed the lawsuit, because it's the only "Belgian newssite" linked. But I've read too quickly over the summary to see it was never implied.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Hercule Poirot
I am not curious enough to go through and check, but Google should be blocking French and German language papers, while allowing other Belgian sites (Flemish and foreign-language [English?]) to be indexed. Are they going to just stop indexing all Belgian sites?
As well, there are many French language papers which are not based in Belgium. Are they being blocked?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?
I reckon there's no way that'd happen. I can count the number of people I know who use Google News on one hand (here in Europe). It's really not that popular. I'd be surprised if even 1% of their audience was using it.
Then who owns the content and copyright? It appears Slashdot wants to stay as far away from "ownership" of comments-article submissions are still comments-as possible, for a variety of good reasons, primarily legal. I can see their point clearly. At best, check to see if links are valid and not goatse redirects, etc, that's about it on the article submissions. Once they start altering content, then you would get as many people bitching about that as you get now bitching about "the submission isn't clear", etc. Personally, I don't think they should change a thing, just reject submissions that are bogus, but don't alter them in any way. It is the lesser of potential problems that way. It isn't perfect, but is the lesser of evils. This isn't like the submitters are hired employees of Slashdot with a normal editor/reporter scenario. They use the word "editor" because that is the closest English language single noun that can describe the process, but obviously it isn't exact, and we don't as yet have an official word for what they do, so it has to be editor. They are article checkers and posters-sort of clunky sounding, isn't it?
I have a similar position on another site, and this is how I deal with it, I do not change the content at all unless the links are bad or the code is screwy, etc., it goes up "as is" or gets rejected. Editorial comments, on the other hand, can be appended to the submitter's original writings, and that is a clear dividing line.
Hmm. Another conspiracy by the evil cartographers? Did you know that more than 99% of all maps are made by cartographers? Definitely some sort of conspiracy going on here.
My blog
misunderstanding the nature of the internet. They want to publish something one day, then take it off and it be hidden so that people can't hold them to it. Their predicament is that they just don't get it. In the (sort of) words of Joe Rogan..." Getting something back from the internet is like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool."
If the article was posted on a no restrictions webpage, then looking at it later might fall under the "time shifting" provisos of the sony betamax case in the US.(I am not a lawyer but can think sneaky like that quite readily) In Belgium, no idea at all, if the Belgians want google to not index and cache their stuff at all...meh, everyone raise their hand who could go the rest of their lives and never be bothered about reading anything about Belgium.
Hmm, looking around at the hands raised, that is 99.999% of the global population. Let them shoot themselves in the foot then. Just like the AFP retards, I used to read a lot of their stuff, now hardly any-because I can't locate it with google news search readily, and I read literally dozens of news articles a day. You know what? Haven't missed AFP at all.
http://www.lesoir.be/robots.txt
"...one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself,..."
How can these papers expect to rewrite history if their old articles can be found, unfiltered, on Google Cach?
This violation of these news papers Intellectual Property must be stopped for the public good.
Their copyright was always being violated.
Google post a link the Chilling Effects with the court order
This is almost as funny as one of those Japanese instruction manuals
http://engrish.com/
So it's like they gave me a book for free and I let people read it.
Then they say "hey, that book is now non-free. You must pay us to let other people read it".
Why can't I say "bugger off"?
Agreed - editors are the one thing why sites like slashdot are worthwhile compared with digg. If you only want to read random shit written by monkeys digg is unbeatable, slashdot should be different
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.
Maybe should should practice your communication skills. If you get "confused" by anything less then 100% perfect writing, YOU need the help. I understood exactly what the author was trying to say regardless of the actual quality of the structure of the specific content.
The ability to successfully communicate is to understand and comprehend what is presented and to respond in a manner required by the person or thing you are communicating with. Not the ability to comprehend absolutely 100% perfect sentence structure and 100% compliance of your default chosen language rules. If you need those requirements to understand something or have difficulty, you are the exception and you have the problem. A lot of people in our society do not have perfect language skills and obviously you have difficulty communicating with them.
I'm sure others will disagree with me but It will be the typical elitist grammar nazi replies which will completely ignore my point.
Nah. The newspaper's webmaster should just learn how to use the 'NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE' tag.
That's like saying you need a "No trespassing" board - otherwise, it's fair game
for trespassers.
Surely some Americans have heard of Eddy Merckx.
while googling in belgium ( google.com), you will be automaticaly redirected to www.google.be/. An indeed on "le soir" search, no site of the newspaper is to be found. so why not ping google.com, just to have the dns resolution and make a search on http://64.233.187.99./ and... yes www.lesoir.be in fisrst place with the "google case" on top !
Why wouldn't they pursue the same arrangement that's been made with The New York Times? AFAIK, all the NYT articles are indexed by google while maintaining the restricted access for visitors. I think they do it by GoogleBot's IP/subnet.
body massage!
Google will simply drop any links to the site.
The question is what will the news paper do now that they've "won" and become invisible on the internet?
The victory is a Phyric one at best.
Nobody will ever be referred to their site when they are searching for the information on Google.
Its stupid and self-destructive.
The paper will eventually fold from lack of readership while their neighbors across the street, who can still be found on the web, will go on...
Who cares?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
They speak actually speak Dutch (Flemish), French (Wallon), and German.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
...AFP sued Google in 2005 for the same reasons.
It's really hard to say how this would affect Google's positions in Belgium but what I noticed is that people here, especially the youth, lots of them are really affected by MS services. I mean 9 e-mails out of 10 belongs to hotmail and the second thing you might be asked (after your GSM number) is what's your MSN?
Though Google search is really at the top here. Even guys at the universities recommends using it.
I am sure they will find some kind of agreement. I wouldn't like to lose all the results coming from Le Soir, La Libre or whatever. And I surely won't change my favourite search engine.
Probably Google send the newspapers the instructions on how to prevent being cached, and considered the case done. If they insist shooting themselves in the foot, let it be.
...for your comics, as well.
Microsoft put the "sucks" in "success".
You forgot a 3rd option: these 13,000 people are breaking copyright law (I guess, as long as they publish it in Belgium, though IANAL). /.'er would know that it's not because you can find content on the internet, that it is legal...
I would think a
References for that: Google for http://www.google.com/search?q=atomium+sabam (SABAM is the Belgian RIAA)...
(So, mod grandparent up, and parent down...)
On a vaguely related note, searching google news for a political organisation I've been involved in regularly brings up fictitious, misleading or just plain barking stories from a particular crazed blog.
I tried emailing google a couple of times, pointing out that the site carried profoundly racist articles, didn't carry any actual news, and was in fact a low grade political blog for right wing nutcases. My emails seem to have disappeared into a black hole.
I'm not arguing against the site's existence, or its listing in google search, and I'm not arguing that it should be censored (I could, since it carries clear and frequent incitement to racial hatred, but I won't right now). It does, however, seem inappropriate to me to list it in google news.
So, if you can take the leap of faith that I might be a reasonable person and not just out to censor things I disagree with, does anybody have any idea how one might get google news to consider delisting a site?
Some can, not all. It's not just from what particular site it is from, but who wrote it that makes the difference. And on some of the big ones, there is so much on written by the big names that is pure crap, while the really good stuff gets buried. Gotta know who's who.
FYI, vrtnieuws.net also has an English section. Here's the article: Google sentenced in Belgian court.
That's a lot better than what usually happens: I click a link from experts-exchange because google has the full text (but won't show it to you from cache) and you have to pay to actually view the article. Which, I might add, ought to be against the rules of google, and grounds for a delisting. Unfortunately, google seems to be party to this (kickbacks?) because they explicitly don't display cached pages from a lot of these sites, but they obviously have the cache with the full material, because they can show me part of it in the search results.
Anyone have a search plugin tool that will remove some sites from the google results? I know you can exclude sites in your search terms, but you only get ten of those, and there are probably dozens of sites like this.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, no, you don't. You have to scroll down, down down, past a couple of screenfuls of ads, and then you'll get the answers. Took me a long long time to realise this, but there you go.
As with their french speaking breathren, Quebec has some funny notions. That is why some girl was able to successfully sue a photographer for taking her picture while she was sitting in a public place. It doesn't say in this article, but from what I can remember of it (it was a few years ago), she was a homeless person, and the photographer was doing some sort of editorial piece for some publication. I had to shake my head a groan when I read it the first time... actually, I still do even when I read it now.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
What google is doing and almost everybody else here is pointing towards robots.txt. For me that is an opt-out. Apparently when it is google, t is OK. It is just when Joe Spammer uses it as an excuse, it is BAD.
:-(
Why not have nobody indexed, exept those that want to. Will that ever be done? No. Will then even more garbadge be indexed then now? Yes.
Yet an opt-in is the only logical way to handle things.
Google indexes my site. This gives Google an added value. Google does not pass this on to me. Also Google is not 'free'. It is gratis, just like TV and in returnd wants me to watch ads.
So even as great as Google (or any other searchengine) is, it should have been opt-in from the start. Now it is too late.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You crazy or something? -- now the same guys are going to C&D all over your ass and you haven't got near google's legal team to save you.
Based on your explanation, it seems as though any ordinary search engine would be outlawed in Belgium.. after all, how can you index sites without a database of some sorts?..
(The word database is here used in the non-geek sense.)
Was it always that way? I refuse to believe that I'm actually this stupid :/
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, that is rich. Brussels, you may have heard the name of that town. Brussels is the political capital of Europe.
The funniest thing is when somebody pretnding to be wise, stumbles on the first stone. Zaire was renamed, ages ago. Go and find the name of the country and then come back and apologize. They speak French btw amongst many native languages (the country is the size of Westerm Europe). In Kenya they speak English and if memory serves me well Masai and some Arabic.
Chile? Easy: Amerindians (if you want the names of the tribes go and fluffify yourself), Caucasian mostly of Spanish origin and mixed from the two above.
Languages in India? Hindi, English, Guajarti, Punjabi, Tamil, etc. (but since they speak several hundreds I'll leave it at that).
Liechtesntein? German.
Monaco? French. The casino is overrated.
You either have culture or don't, making excuses for it does not make it any better.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But they would be all footballers and cyclists.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That's pretty much what the whole article and the lawsuit are about: either they're idiots, or they have some ulterior motive.
I think that they were probably hoping to use the suit and rulings as leverage in order to wring some money out of Google, and that's why they didn't take the cheap and simple way out and just use a robots.txt file, which I have to imagine even the most backwards webmaster has heard about.
Frankly I foresee this sort of thing becoming all too common in the near future; as people move from traditional sources of news and information (particularly newspapers) to more timely and convenient methods (the internet), you're going to see a desperate effort on the part of traditional media outlets to get a cut of the pie, lest they go out of business. In my opinion, they don't deserve a cut and should probably be allowed to wither; if their demise means that there's no content for Google to display on the news.google.com page, then Google can go out and hire journalists to discover it. Or they'll just buy it from the wire services like the newspapers did anyway, meaning that you'll finally have the system split as it always should have been: you have people dedicated to researching and reporting the news (e.g., Reuters), and then you have other people who are dedicated to packaging together that news into things that customers want to read, and delivering it to them (e.g., Google News, CNN).
The newspaper as a business model is obsolete; there is no reason why the same organization that actually has the reporters needs to or ought to be the same organization that does the publication.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Google News doesn't republish the information with their own ads; all they do is provide you a list of links from traditional news sources' sites along with the first sentence or two of the article, so you can click on it. To read any full article on Google News, you end up looking at the publishing newspaper's advertising. (Unless you're running AdBlock, of course.)
As far as I can tell, the newspaper's complaint actually isn't even about Google News, it's about Google's cache on the regular search results page. They didn't have a robots.txt file, so Google cached the page. Now they're upset about that, but it's pretty much established procedure on the internet that unless you put up a robots.txt file, spiders can and will cache your page; this is how Google works, it's how the Internet Archive works, and I'm sure it's how lots of other search engines work.
Rather than putting up a robots.txt file like everybody else, these newspapers decided to try and go to court and squeeze some money out of Google, and as a result Google dumped them from their systems completely; the cache, regular search results, and Google News.
Personally I don't have much sympathy for the newspapers; they're hanging on to a dying business model that's rapidly becoming obsolete, and history has shown that such stances are generally not productive. They need to either find a way to work with the new ways that people want to get content, or get out of the way. It seems that intentionally or not, they're choosing the latter.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
hercule poirot