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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.
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
Now, that's not a bad idea at all... don't know why it's modded Funny; If I had mod points, it would get modded Insightful.
Tit for tat... if we can't link to your articles, we won't give you links to help you write those articles.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Typical example of different point of perceptions and the problem of Wikipedia:
Erasmus was Belgian but Belgium was part of the Netherlands back then, hence the misconception that he was born in the "southern netherlands".
Same deal with Descartes (and I'm talking about the cartographer). He was definatly Belgian, you can even visit the house he was born here.
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?
Maybe they could create a feature to sort by mainstream media and all other sources. However, I like having all available sources show up because you get to see news stories develop for months sometimes before the mainstream media reports anything on it.
Can't say I'm surprised. They have some strange legal notions in Belgium that don't match up with the rest of the civilized world. I got C&D from a Belgian company through a law firm in New York. The Belgian company claims to own the copyright to my vacation photos (with me standing in them!). The law firm (acting on behalf of the Belgians) demanded I take them off my web site or they'd sue me into oblivion.
I always warn people I know who are vacationing in Europe -- avoid Belgium. Who knows what else they will try to persecute you for there.
World's tallest building rises in the desert
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.
IANAL, but the issue at stake is certainly copyright and possibly database right. In the Netherlands, so possibly in Belgium as well, there is something called databankrecht that means that even if a publisher allows you to view all individual articles from a repository, you are not allowed to copy the whole database by downloading all articles and keep them in storage. In terms of copyright, you are certainly not allowed to copy and distribute (including putting online) the stack of newspapers in your garage, but under fair use (assuming it exists in belgium) you are probably free to give your old paper to a friend to read.
Their issue with google is probably exactly what the GP suggests: they make money out of their archive, both by individuals downloading for-pay archived articles, and through more business-aimed services such as LexisNexis. So, if google caches and returns (=copy and distribute) their old articles, they are violating copyright and depriving them of their source of income, so it is no surprise that they sue google.
(whether you agree with copyright and database right laws is a different matter, of course)
If an author and/or appropriate copyright owner takes his book, rips out every page of it and lays it like a grid in the center of a city, and people come along and start taking pictures of it... the author has no right to restrict how the pictures are distributed, despite the fact that others who view the pictures may be able to read the book (assuming the photographs were high enough quality). The fact is, if you're putting your work out in public, than the public should have the right to archive it for themselves and add to the collective human creativeness. What you're arguing is like saying GAP owns any picture with people wearing their logo. If you're publicly dispersing a work, without discretion, then you should lose all legal rights to retainment. The law may not currently work like this, but laws were made to be changed :) A creative work is the property of humanity first, and the individual second. It is only in the last century or two that people have started trying to reverse this.
Regards,
Steve
From a quick glance at the ruling on chilling effects, the defene google put together (citing copyright law, database laws, etc) was not valid.
The ruling specifically talks about google's "cache". This would include the search cache.
In other words, they probably have good legal advice to remove these sites from the search cache (not just news) because these companies would be able to sue them again with exactly the same complaint for having their content in the search index.
It would be a legal liability to keep them in the search index.
And a lot of people see it as exactly that, and are thankful for the traffic Google sends their way. I get about 140 referrals from Google a day, and am very welcoming to the Google spiders.
Nonetheless, this argument is very similar to the "Musicians should see Napster as an advertising medium to sell concert tickets" debate — some musicians do, while others don't, and it isn't really fair for people to declare that those who don't should just suck it and tow the line.
In this case the creators of the actual content (or the people who paid AP or CP or UP or Reuters or whoever originated the content — they do have to pay them, and can't say "Well we're giving Reuters free advertising!") decided that they didn't consider it kosher as simply free advertising, and the model didn't work for them. They asked Google to start either sharing some of the lucre that Google is making from the server — and google is making a lot of money from these sorts of services, and they aren't doing it because of benevolence – or stop acting as repeaters for their content.
Seems reasonable to me.