Google Relents, Publishes Belgian Ruling
gambit3 writes "Google on Saturday published on its Belgian website a court order which forbids the Internet search engine to reproduce snippets of Belgian press on its news amalgamation service. The move constituted a u-turn as Google had said on Friday that it would not comply with the court order despite facing a fine of 500,000 euros ($640,900) daily if it did not publish the ruling." From the article: "Google said its service is lawful and drives traffic to newspaper sites because people need to click through to the original publisher to read the full story. It now displays stories from news agencies, foreign newspapers and Internet sites belonging to local television stations."
I still fail to see how it is a copyright infringement to link to news articles? It's not like Google is hosting the article on it's own website.
According to the ruling I'm reading right now on google.be, I can sum up your misunderstanding in two words: Google cache.
You can't take the sky from me...
Yes, I just checked.
robots.txt is an opt-out. The law in Belgium requires an opt-in, not an opt-out.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The singing nun, ...
Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the sax
Jacques Rogge, the current president of the International Olympic Comittee
Rene Magritte
Peter Paul Rubens
Georges Simenon
Kim Clijsters
Justine Henin-Hardenne
There are actually lots of famous Belgians.
Aw, c'mon, if there was a problem reading it here in China, it would be about the Chinese Internet Site Blocking policies and not about Google. Notable sites blocked to us internet users in China: - wikipedia (accessible through proxy) - Technorati (utterly and completely inaccessible) - BBC (completely and totally blocked) - Anything on angelfire domain - Geocities (sometimes accessible through proxy) - Google.com (quite often blocked but you can just go to google.co.uk usually) - Google.cn (believe it... often blocked I guess because of other people's searches on your IP range) - MSN search (sometimes blocked) - Yahoo search (sometimes blocked or throttled) - DrudgeReport (depending on news items) - Just about any page about an*nymizer or pr*xy servers - and if you try to browse to a page about f*l*n g*ng your whole internet access will just stop working for half an hour. If anything the reason Google had to buckle to censorship demands in .cn was because if they let everything get searched people wouldn't be able access the results anyway and people would find their connections getting cut just for the google search results even if they hadn't clicked them.
-- now to hit submit and see if this gets sniffed and blocked :\