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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.
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.
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
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.
ice 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.
Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official. I've always viewed it as sort of a hub, where influential Europeans meet to make decisions. But, I've never been there, so maybe my perspective is skewed.
I think you missed the point of the comment.
...
The newspaper is upset with Google because they link to their site without sharing in any of the profit the make through advertising; but google links to everyone's site without sharing any advertizing and if everyone reacted the same way these newspapers did it would become impossible to search the internet for anything.
Anyways
Like most people (I imagine) I rarely remember the address of sites I wish to visit and usually google for them; now that these papers decided being refrenced by google was a bad thing I bet their site viewership goes way down and they lose a lot of money from advertizing.
The newspaper's webmaster should just learn how to use the 'NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE' tag.
Bingo. If " 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." is accuarate, they failed to avail themselves of the quick, easy, and cheap solution. Obviously, that's not what it really was about.
I don't understand why news outlets get so upset when sites like google point people to their content. They should think of it as free advertising.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
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.
The last numbers I saw placed Google as having about 45% of the search market. That isn't even in the running for being a monopoly.
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.
As far as I can tell, there is no way in which this ruling applies to news.google.com that does not apply equally to google.com search. If one is ruled illegal by the courts, the other is probably just as illegal, so it makes sense to remove them from both.
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).
If Google had a monopoly, this could be an antitrust issue, but I've seen no evidence of that. There are a lot of players in the search market and Google has instituted absolutely no lock-in of any kind. Nothing stops Belgians from moving to something else, aside from the fact that the others tend to be lower quality. I don't foresee any antitrust action against them for this, nor any grounds for it. Since they don't wield monopoly influence in the market, I don't see how this is "evil."
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
...greed is the great destroyer.
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
If you would look at the submitter's text, and the fact that the submitter's URL is .be, it might occur to you that the submitter isn't a native Engish speaker, and figure he made a simple mistake. In fact, you might even surmise that the submitter is Belgian, and would therefore not be likely to be confused about what languages are spoken in Belgium.
Even if you're going to be a pedant, in the sentence "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN?", 'Belgian' could just as easily be read as a mistaken use of the adjective form instead of the noun form, i.e. "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgium...".
And I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on basic logic and common decency.
-Esme
Because Google's motto is 'Don't be evil' and not 'Don't be evil unless someone pisses you off, then do whatever the fsck you want.'
Google has done the very un-evilest thing they could in that situation. To attempt to further penalize those companies could (and probably would) be considered 'evil'.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Being Belgian I feel offended by what you just said... Could you define news-worthy? Just because our country is not waging war all over the world doesn't mean we don't have anything news-worthy happening...
I don't see google doing this to be spiteful. If these papers are suing for reproducing their content, google is covering its arse by not repeating that offense by returning search results with an extract of the page. If google removed results unilaterally, of any site, for any reason, there would go their credibility.
Why do people always call places they have no clue about 'dull'?
It's a reflection of their imagination.
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?
I'm sure the Belgians will have heard of those people. And equally I'm sure you can name some people who will be famous in the US but draw a complete blank elsewhere - sure, it's disproportionate because of Hollywood and the fact that the US presidents tend to make as many waves as possible when abroad, but if you're going to be talking about the rest of the world you should probably remember that the US is not "most people".
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
can't say I'm surprised. They have some strange legal notions in Belgium
Yeah, one stupid company and the whole country should be avoided. Expert advice, Wayne!
This is quite a sensible decision by the belgian court, I think. Several newspapers offer the news of today for free on their websites, and let you pay for searching the archives. Google caches those pages and offers them for free with their own ads added. Plain and simple copyright violation, no arguing around it. But quite convenient of course...
escalating the issue to searching is really abusive
Why?
Google just got sued by these guys for indexing their site. When you lose a lawsuit with ignorant assholes (i.e. anyone running a business on the web who doesn't use robots.txt and then complains about being indexed), the safest thing to do is make completely sure there's nothing left by which they can leverage that lawsuit into something like a contempt complaint.
Of course, not being indexed by Google can apparently be the basis for a lawsuit, too. Damned if you do...
Log in or piss off.
I believe they were only required to remove links from Google News, but for whatever reasons they decided to effectively eradicate the site from Google completely. Read into that what you will.
So you believe Google indexing has some value to this newspaper, yet they paid exactly nothing to Google for this service. It seems to me they have absolutely no claim. If I'm receiving free electricity but complain to the power company about the power lines on my property, I can't very well complain if they cut me off when they remove the lines.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.
I hate to tell you this, but Belgium is not a major country. Do you happen to know what languages are commonly spoken in Zaire or Kenya? Or what the different ethnicities of the people in Chile are? What languages are commonly spoken in India (all of them, please)? What are the common languages spoken in Liechtenstein and Monaco? These questions are akin to asking what languages are common in Belgium.
If we were talking about the UK, France, Germany, or Italy, you might have a valid complaint about people not knowing a little about what languages are spoken there. But I think it's quite acceptable for someone on a different continent to have to do some research to find out about tiny countries like Andorra, Luxembourg, and Belgium.
hmm, reading further in the thread, apparently my lack of knowledge of the syntax of robots.txt is only matched by my willingness to make a fool of myself. If indeed NOCACHE is an option, and respected by Google, then these Belgians are stupid to go to court for something that has an easy technological fix and the court is stupid to allow this.