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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.
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
There's no such thing as a language called 'Belgian.'
/.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.
They speak Dutch (Flemish), French, and German.
I sometimes wonder about the average
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
Belgians do not speak Belgian. They speak either French or a dialect of Dutch known as Flemish.
, 00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1604253
KFG
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.
... complicated, politically.
Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.
There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is
But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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
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.
Actually, I submitted the story, previewed it, to only discover later that I typed 'Belgian' instead of 'Belgium'. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry also if the text was not clear. Wouldn't it be good if there were any editors at Slashdot to correct obvious mistakes? ;) And yes, I'm not a native english speaker. Thanks for defending me!
-- No signature yet.
Apparently, they have ordered these large fines thanks to the attitude of Google.
;"
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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?
First of all, Google News doesn't have ANY ads, mainly because of concerns over copyright that you mentioned. Secondly, Google Web Search only displays its ads in its search listings, NOT when you view the cached page. And most competent webmasters know that if they don't want their content cached by Google, they can just edit their robots.txt file to exclude themselves from being cached, or even indexed.
I just can't understand why news sites don't want to be on Google News. I've gone to news sites (and hence seen that news site's ads)that I never would have otherwise gone to unless I'd browsed Google News. Why aren't the news sites happy for the free exposure?
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but this has definitely happened in Chicago
When it comes to copyright that's not entirely true because of the reciprocity aspects of the Berne Convention.