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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 am all for fair use. But the fact that Google copies, changes, reassembles, etc. copyrighted information without anyone's consent should be challenged. The challenge, while difficult to overcome at first 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.
in webtraffic.
Good for them.
Will they sue Yahoo/MSN next?
apparently, in Europe, the Ministry of Truth is working well - making sure that old news doesn't rear it ugly head to compete with the news of today.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Any competent web developer should know how to use the The Robots Exclusion Protocol to prevent crawlers from crawling/indexing a web site. Why News Sites do not want to be visited by Google is really beyond me - it is free advertising! Visitors still have to visit the news sites if they want to read anything but a short article summary.
Sure, maybe for the moment, but I think you'd be surprised as to how rapidly their subscription fees are dwindling. Who needs a newspaper when you can get all of your news faster and cheaper with Google?
The loss of their ability to be the only news source is why they are suing Google in the first place. If they didn't fear Google's strength in the market of luring subscriber's away, they wouldn't be suing, would they?
The issue isn't about linking or copyright or caching. Google lost the case. They removed the offending content.
The issue was whether the judge could require Google to publish his opinion on the front page of Google.
Question 1) If the NY Times lost a case, could a judge order them to use the whole front page to publish her opinion?
Question 2) if you lost a case, could a judge order you to buy the front page of the LA Times to publish his opinion?
Perhaps this is some Belgian thing, where a judge can require losing defendants to publish the judge's opinion on the front page of a national paper.
To our Belgian friends: is this a common practice?
Al
Belgium!!
You must be an American. If you didn't know, Belgium is THE economic hub for Europe. Not only do all roadways, waterways, railways meet there, also quite some important political and economical centers and buildings are located there (The European Union itself is in Brussels). The other problem is that Belgium itself doesn't have that of a great information structure. If you're in Belgium, your internet connection feed into the backbones is most likely located in Amsterdam (so you will effectively kill the Netherlands and Google's datacenter there too) but there is also an international backbone connection in Antwerp (feeding parts of Germany and the Netherlands too) and in Brussels/Zaventem (for Belgium, the American Embassy and the airport businesses) and sometimes our backbone feeds are even across the Atlantic ocean somewhere in New York.
So if you want to have Google disconnect 30% of Europe and 5% of the USA next to the bad publicity just because some stupid Wallonian newspapers
can't get their sh-t together, feel free. BTW: Wallonia != Belgium. The (smarter) Flemish part of Belgium including Brussels has the higher penetration of internet, businesses and people. The Wallonians are like the Southerners and those in power, GWB here in the States.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Actually, if the newspaper staff themselves had ever submitted their URL to google for inclusion after Google had deployed their caching technology, Google should appeal this and countersue the paper for willful negligence, fraud, extortion, and anything else their legal team can dream up.
On top of removing and permanently banning them from the Google index.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I believe this decision to be stupid . I only ever access those sites through gnews. no more now.
But there are, i think 2 'real' reason behind this action, if you listen to what media people say here:
-targeted marketing : with google news, google get his marketing info for personnalised ads database. Not the newspaper.
i believe this is The reason behind that lawsuit. they dont care about their content, they know they will loose hits, they know people dont read the news on google cache but come to their site, but direct ads marketing is where the money will be (already is ?).
-Also, many 'paper'newspaper are dying now, surviving only with local info. So, they rely more and more on news agency feed for internationnal/nationnal news, usually changing the title and 2 words before publishing it. gnews make that very obvious, when 5 newspaper had exactly the same text, linked next to each others...
i heard tvnews site have got a 30% up hit since they are still on gnews, with a 25% down on blocked site.
The Belgian court's decision in the Google case creates an interesting precedent. This decision could be used by anyone in Belgium whose content is the target of a link. On the basis of a link to .be, anyone could find themselves targetted and fined by a Belgian court.
Every so often a court emits a ruling that makes it impossible to know what's legal and what's not, and leaves one open to liabilities that could not possibly be predicted. This, like the EU's rulings against Microsoft (also out of Brussels), are of this kind, and the only rational response is to withdraw completely and wait for more predictable circumstances.
If I was Google's (or any other search service') lawyer, my advice would be to (1) immediately remove all .be links, (2) stop indexing .be and (3) set up an opt-in protocol that would restore indexing to any .be site that supplies a legally-binding authorization to index. Since the Belgian court has decreed that Belgians are too stupid to understand robots.txt, a corresponding opt-in flag would be insufficient.
On a positive note: nothing much of interest happpens in Belgium, so if the world is spared headlines about the rising price of mussels in Brussels, we aren't likely to notice.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.