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

Better than over inclusion of "News" Sites

[Hellad]

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.

Re:Block IPs?

[OECD]

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.