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.

Comments

Block IPs?

[DzugZug]

Google should block the Newspaper's IP addresses so that their reporters cannot use Google in their research.

French?

[evil agent]

Stupid Flanders...

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

[kamapuaa]

No, you're talking about the wrong kind of famous person. I think the grandparent post meant the kind of famous people that most people have heard of.

Re:Ah, Belgium

[Maxo-Texas]

I don't know... looking on google, I don't find anything happening in Belgium.

Re:Ah, Belgium

[tarscher]

We also have very good chocolate, waffles and child molesters.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

[Andrewkov]

There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures ... and the Dutch.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such thing as a language called 'Belgian.'
They speak Dutch (Flemish), French, and German.
I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.

I don't care what they call their language as long as they stay in South America where they belong.

Re:Can we get some editing here please?

[morgan_greywolf]

unless you doubt the existence of Belgium (and let's not get in to that here).

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.