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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...it's linking. It's a shame that companies are so money hungry that they want to be paid for someone directing traffic to their site. Next business will want money from taxi drivers for delivering customers.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Fair use is a longstanding element of copyright that "content owners" (sic) were hoping we would all just eventually forget about. Google's indexing of information (even if it involves copying without permission) is a perfect example of fair use, and hopefully this case will be high-profile enough to get people asking questions about this stuff
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Damn, you beat me to it! That's what I was thinking, too.
Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it, they couldn't make 1/10 of that from Belgian operations. Shutting down google.be would be fairly harsh to the Belgian citizens who probably couldn't care less about the ruling, but hey, they'd care after that.
Actually, let's do some calculations for fun...
Google had gross revenue of $6B last year. That's $1 per person on the planet per YEAR (obviously not everyone on the planet uses Google but this will work for a rough estimate). Say Belgium would then be responsible for $10M a year. That's under $30k a day. Assume Belgians are avid Google users and round it up to $50k per day, and hey, my 1/10 estimate above wasn't too bad...
But the fact that Google copies, changes, reassembles, etc. copyrighted information without anyone's consent should be challenged.
If they did, then it should be challenged, but that's not what they're doing.
may potentially lead to Google winning the case and setting a precedent whereby all information publicly available on the internet would be entered into the public domain or at least break ground for fair use.
If you want to put content on the Internet and not have it be indexed, archived, and/or republished, you have two simple options: use a robots.txt file or require a loging.
What is really going on is that companies like the Belgian newspapers want to destroy the public domain and fair use: if companies like Google can't assume that content that is freely available on the Internet is actually either public domain or available under fair use, then public domain and fair use are dead.
In different words, companies like the Belgian newspaper are trying to kill the public domain and fair use through FUD. And the Belgian court has handed them a victory. It's disgusting.
This is a concept of common law, however, and an intentional loophole in the treaty; individual nations don't have to allow for "fair use." Apparently, Belgium doesn't.