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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.
Google should block the Newspaper's IP addresses so that their reporters cannot use Google in their research.
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
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
Stupid Flanders...
End transmission.
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.
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
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?
No, you're talking about the wrong kind of famous person. I think the grandparent post meant the kind of famous people that most people have heard of.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
I don't know... looking on google, I don't find anything happening in Belgium.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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
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?
We also have very good chocolate, waffles and child molesters.
There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures ... and the Dutch.
Hmm. Another conspiracy by the evil cartographers? Did you know that more than 99% of all maps are made by cartographers? Definitely some sort of conspiracy going on here.
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