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

Why only google.be, not google.com/.fr?

[Gregory Cox]

Yes, but the poster makes an important point. google.be is blocking the sites, but google.com is not. google.fr is not either.

It seems like the block has no practical effect, since you can find everything by going to google.com or .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.

I don't know why they did this for .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.

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

[waynelorentz]

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.