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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."
Can you read it in China?
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?
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.
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.
I went over to www.google.be. No one will know what's going on--the whole thing is written in Belgian. Brilliant, Google!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
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.
... that by banning Google from reprinting their stories, they have shot themselves in the revenue-hungry foot. Without Google serving up ads for them or redirects to their pages that contain ads, I predict a massive drop in their internet based income. It could very well be enough to kill the already fragile print media (or at least that one outlet).
Eventually news corporations will realize that they need Google a hell of a lot more than Google needs them.
(It's kind of scary that Google has become so powerful that they can order news corporations around, but I'd rather it be them in power than the news co's.)
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...
I agree. screw them. Let's see how the people feel if they dont have Google. You can bet your ass there would be some civil unrest.
china > belgium
http://michaelsmith.id.au
A) Feed a lot of children in Africa ..among other things. As others have said, the Belgian French-Speaking press need to be taught a lesson in humility, and perhaps another concerning the workings of the Tubes.
B) Donate to cancer research
C) Buy me a new graphics card
If only we had more New Yorkers on the Google high board.
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
This is the official translation to english (low quality pdf), sent to me by a belgian teacher of mine. Don't know if it's available elsewhere ...
My other UID is 1337
Sidestepping the copyright issue for the moment, if the ads on the news sites also appear in the cached material, then it is hard to see what loss there is to the news sites or their advertisers.
And if that is the case (I don't know that the above is the case, though that has been my experience reading cached Google material) then it seems likely that the load on the news servers is also reduced, which may cut their bandwidth expenses while still getting their material in front of more eyeballs.
Also, if people on the net are paying the news sites $0 (or 0) per visit or view, isn't the multiplied loss still a flat zero? If you give your copyrighted material away, how can you claim a loss when someone else does the same thing with your material?
I admit those are all pragmatic issues and perhaps not legal ones (except maybe the last one) but I guess I'm in the group of people who wonders what these sites are thinking? Looks like they'll lose the war by winning the wrong battle. It all seems like a classic case of spitting into the wind to curse the storm, in my humble opinion.
the only country in the world named after a curse word.
(Someone needed to say it)
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
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.
i've seen to many patents/copyright lawsuits, i'm all for breaking copyright/patents.. monkeys and their damn text with mumble jumble.. who cares.. i will not obey your patents and copieright i wil continue to disobey until you lie in your own shit, with all your lawsuit documents and your patents stuff up your ass, it means absolutely nothing. screw the law.
Yargghh! And screw grammar and spelling! It's just keepin' the man down.
"Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it"
... "Belgium would then be responsible for $10M a year."
This is a fine IF google does NOT follow the court judgement. A fine must be high enough so that Google cannot disregard the court decision.
Now they can shutdown Google.be, sure, but what will be the WORLD public opinion if they decide to shutdown Belgium because they don't like the court order (that affect only the content of the news aggregator) while at the same time they filter everything for the chinese government ?
"Google had gross revenue of $6B last year. That's $1 per person on the planet per YEAR"
And Google makes less than $1B in USA, Japan and Europe all together. Much less than in China alone.
It seems to me that you fail to get that belgian newspaper get very little from, e.g., American people stumbling randomly through a Google link on their sites. They get revenue through advertisement made for Belgian readers. If no belgian newspaper is on Google anymore, lot of Belgians will just cease to use Google, and go to another search engine, which still indexes the content of '.be' sites.
Among all the possible search engines, I guess that at least one will pay the editors for their content. If you imagine that all others stop indexing Belgium, that one (if there was only one) would be sure to become known as the most complete one. It would have token the whole (tiny) market of Belgium.
And who knows what country will follow?
Of course, this path of action is flawed. If Google (and only them) is paying, and indexing, the newspaper, and if e.g. only MSN Live indexes the official sites (and pay them?), and only Yahoo indexes (and pay) the television sites,... we'll have no way to get a global search on everything.
-- No signature yet.
The EU was founded to create a lasting peace and cooperation in Europe - to claim anything else is just silly. Suing Microsoft has everything to do with the EU because free trade within the block is vital, and Microsoft was breaking EU competition laws and not respecting the verdict. Now when some group of Belgian companies sue Google in Belgian courts (not EU courts) it has NOTHING to do with the EU!
Has anybody actually done any research showing how many people click through from news aggregate sites? I would be very surprised if most aggregate users don't just read the headlines and leave it at that. I think this (legal battle) being an issue relates more to the way in which people read the news on the Interweb. Reading only headlines leads to no thoughput to the news sites since people already believe they have all the information they need.
- Carnun, Son of Danu -
"Existentialism lead to nihilism. Nihilism lead to dancing"
Belgium!!
You say its an outrage what the Belgian court did - I on the other hand think it says a lot about your lack of understanding for Belgian sovereignty and their independent legal system. Maybe you should not be so quick to judge something you do not know or understand. Unless you know much about the European Civil Law system (as opposed to Anglo-American common law) and Belgiums traditions you have no right to be critical of their verdict and practises. The very fact that they forced Google to publish the verdict is not so shocking to me, as a fellow European citizen, because its in fact very common for media companies to repent in this way. The humiliation has nothing do with - its letting the public know whats acceptable and not.
P.S. In no way is the robots.txt issue an open and shut case for European legal systems..
First, Google is doing this with the web site's owner's consent: it's an Internet standard that you give or deny consent with a robots.txt file. If the Belgian web sites don't exclude Google with their robots.txt file, obviously the web site owner has given consent.
Belgium has a very stringent opt-in law, the kind that privacy advocates in the US dream about. Everything must be opt-in, no exceptions.
robots.txt is the internet standard, yes. It is also opt-out, because you are assumed to give consent unless you take an action.
The judge ruled correctly based on Belgian law.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
They could have easily just complied with the court order but instead they had to make a point by petulently removing all links to the relevant newspapers and even making it hard for people to read the judgement. This is manipulating search data for political purposes to suit their own agenda. It raises doubts in my mind about how much I can trust their search engine to try and be accurate, honest and to help me find what I'm looking for.
Now they're just another group of monopolist bullies.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Yes, and which telco astroturfer might you be?
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
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
Or since the ruling, has the default language of the Belgian Google changed from Dutch to French?
I loaded the page, and it was in French. Then I changed it to Dutch, and the introductory text changed to Dutch, but the ruling was still in French. Then I changed it to English, and the ruling was still in French! They never translated it.
Tell me, are Belgian courts in the habits of issuing rulings that only half the country can read?
Bullcrap.
Google is the one being bullied here. The government has police and guns and plenty of power. They can take your shit. They can put you in jail.
Google is doing the only thing they can do to protest: they're refusing to provide a service. They're not slaves, you know.
But even then they're not really free since they've been forced to use their resources to publish this ruling. They can't really say 'no', can they?
Calling Google a bully is like calling protestors that sit down in the street bullies. When the other side has the force of law and violence on it's side, that's all a sane person can do.
....eh, fuck this. *cracks another one open*
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
You don't get it. All they have to do is not be a business entity in Belgium. Then they can't be sued there.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
If you didn't know, Belgium is THE economic hub for Europe.
And apparently, it's THE stupidity hub as well.
The (smarter) Flemish part of Belgium including Brussels has the higher penetration of internet, businesses and people.
It's all looks like Belgium from the outside, bub.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
You could try pressing the 'English' link on the page...
While we are knocking Belgium can anyone answer the old pub question "name 5 famous Belgians ?" The first 2 are easy, Eddie Mercyx and Jean Claude Van Dam but after that .......
You really brought your A game...
Somebody make this chap a moderator or something.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
It doesn't help much though, as the english translation is incomprehensible legalese:
francophone et germanophone représentés par la demanderesse à dater de la signification de l'ordonnance, sous peine d'astreinte de 2.000.000,- par jour de retard;
Those wacky Americans lawyers and their lawyerspeak, only thing I understood was 'retard' and 2 million, maybe it has something to do with the amount of stupid sites on the internet.
No one will pay to index any news sites because it sets the precedent that content providers can charge them to let them index. It may seem like a small cost per site, but the strength of any search engine is breadth, and no search engine can afford to pay even a portion of the content they index. Especially since no search engine has a viable business model beyond advertising, a dubious income stream at best.
The Belgian newspapers shot themselves in the foot, and they'll cave after a while when they recognize that they can't strongarm Google into paying, and the cost of their attempt is a serious drop in the traffic they've come to expect.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
but hey, they'd care after that.
Why, wont they can just search google.com instead of google.be?
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Truncating it, sure, but no real modifications.
WASHINGTON (DC) -- Congress shall make no law...
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
No, they are certainly not slaves. They are infantile, petulant billionaires. They want all information to be free so they can put an advertisement on it. Well except for information about their nuevo rich founders like Eric Schmidt. And information about their own assessment of their business health, ie. industry standard guidance about their projected earnings. Or information that would prevent them from doing business in an emerging market like China. And information about technologies that they don't want anyone else to use without paying such as that restrained by Google's patent portfolio. Or information about what people search for and what links people click on, they hold that very tightly to themselves. Or information about supposed click-fraud.
Google isn't your friend. They've never been your friend. They don't care about you. They don't care about freedom. They just want money. Even Google's philanthropic arm is for profit. End of story.
Personally, I'm here, reading this story, because Google linked me to it. Of course, the actions of real people are irrelevant to the legal system.
But Belgium doesn't exist!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
"Now they're just another group of monopolist bullies."
Oh yes the poor Belgium newspapers are being picked on by big bad Google.
What a load of rubbish.
These guys just finished suing Google for listing their sites on Google news. Who's to say that next week they won't decide to sue Google for including them in their regular search indexes? After all Google's search results include a snippet of the page they link to just like their news site did. How is that any more legal?
Better for Google to just yank all links to these clowns. It's just not worth the risk of getting dragged into court again.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the newspapers in this case. By suing they pretty much asked Google to remove their links. The old adage about being careful what you wish for would seem to apply.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
So, if I design some sort of Internet utility, and I happen to break the laws of some piss-ant country, and they sue...wtf should I care? They have no authority over me anyway...provided I don't have any sort of branch in that country, I'm safe, right?
Isn't the man the one we want to bring down? ;)
Great Intellect...
If there was only one belgian with mod points to put a "Flamebait" on this post ...
"The (smarter) Flemish part of Belgium including Brussels" : well, you mean that 80% of french-speaking people living in brussels are now flemish ?
"he Wallonians are like the Southerners and those in power, GWB here in the States." : let's see where will the far right "muslims are bad" party get the most votes in the next elections,
It is also opt-out, because you are assumed to give consent unless you take an action.
They have taken plenty of action: they put up a web server and put up the stuff on the Internet.
The judge ruled correctly based on Belgian law.
Then Belgian law is broken.
Belgium has a very stringent opt-in law, the kind that privacy advocates in the US dream about.
This has nothing to do with privacy.
Google's motto of "Do No Evil" has one very distinct flaw:
People disagree on what "evil" means.
Obviously Google thinks it's doing the right thing by spreading information to the masses, like the information on this newspaper's website.
The newspaper, on the other hand, thinks that action is quite evil. They are losing ad revenue because of it.
-David
What happened is that these newspapers temporarely put their articles public and then, typically the day after, make them non-public again. Ofcourse by then google has happily passed by and put those articles in their cache thus making them publicly availalbe while they aren't anymore. Eh voila, we have a court case.
I actually have no idea on the google cache details but I'ld expect that if you use a correct expire value in your header that they get removed again from google or that google atleast checks if the content is still available before showing it to the user. Ofcourse the newspapers could've easily used a robot.txt file to prevent google from caching these articles in the first place instead of having to go to court to achieve exactly the same thing.
Maybe a little bit of background info: In belgium we have a special court of appeal with judges that actually know something about IT, this in sharp contrast ofcourse with all those babyboomer-generation judges making up the majority of the courts, that havent got the slightests clue and probably are even afraid/angry of that whole internet thing and computers in general. Since google has appealed the deciscion, we might eventually see this ruling overturned but that might take a while (the newspapars used a special procedure for 'urgent' matters which typically results in the kind of ruling we are discussing here).
FYI: IANAL, just a belgian it guy that that tries to be a bit more informed about legal aspects of it then average, if only because of a retarted judge in germany that in essence ruled that the postal system is responsible for spam and not whomever actually took the initiative the have an email/ecard sent in the first place (yes this applies to every send to a friend feature out there) *rolleyes*
Google with all its billions could easily afford to set up their own news service in Belgium. They have the infrastructure. This would soon extensively rediuce the belgian newspapers revenue
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.
My point was that when I search on Google I want to trust that they will return the results I want. Instead, they have shown that they are willing to manipulate search results to punish sites. Google could have kept the morale high ground by just removing a load of links to the Belgian sites and taking them out of google news. Instead they went much further and purely out of spite they even removed access to the court judgement.
Googles role in search gives them a lot of power. If they remove something from their search results it may as well not be on the internet for a large number (a majority even) of internet users. The more they manipulate search to hurt their enemies the less trustworthy they become. As a result of this I'm now going to have to start using alternative search engines more often just in case Google have decided that they don't want me to see what I'm looking for.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Ignoring your flaimbate jab, I do find the difference with the approach of the Flemish publishing-industry interesting. They simply chose to opt-out from Google News.be when it was launched, but stayed in de google.be index (try site:standaard.be, or site:vrtnieuws.net). The later choice seems logical if you want to get revenue from your pay-per-article section (like De Standaard), and shows that they are not opposed in principle to being indexed; but why then opt-out of Google News?
... in Mediargus, an -- very usefull, but expensive for individuals -- aggregation en clearing service for (mainly) Flemish media.
The only reason I can think of atm., is the involvement of all the major (Flemish) publishing concerns like VUM/Corelio, Roularta, Concentra,
Mabye they see Google News (but not the standard google index) as competition for that initiative? Dunno...
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 :\
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.
Now about the court order, there was only one party at the hearing, google never got an invitation.
; "
FTFA: "Attendu que le tribunal de céans ne manque pas d'être surpris par l'attitude de la défenderesse qui n'a pas jugé utile de participer à la mission d'expertise, malgré les invitations qui lui avaient été adressées par l'expert judiciaire, et qui ne comparaît pas
For those who can't parse French: The tribunal is surprised by google's attitude, who failed to participate in the expert proceedings despite invitations to do so.
You can't take the sky from me...
You are saying that the WWW is a predominantly Private media, which, by exception can be made public?
If that is really what you were saying - there is nothing wrong with that concept; after all, other parts of the internet, like FTP are certainly that way...
But I think you have a few hundred-million minds to change before people "get" that!
(And some might already be attached to the web as a 'social' venue.)
So, according to your logic, all SPAM is legit as long as you can opt-out afterwards???
That's a dangerous attitude.
There are about 4 milion French speaking Belgians.
That is a small market, these newspapers don't earn any money (worth mentionning) from their website's anyway.
The website are a service to existing newspaper customers.
If these customers can use google as an archive, the service becomes useless.
Probably of no interest to anyone, but there is a cattle station in Australia bigger than Belgium
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
This might not have much of an impact. For example, I haven't seen the "Google Deutschland" page at google.de for many months now, because I use google.com exclusively. I've tried looking for some comparative usage stats for Google's country domains to check, but I haven't found any (I'm sure they exist though).
---
On another note, what precisely is the Belgian court accomplishing through this? And what is Google losing? It has to be significant somehow, otherwise Google wouldn't have refused and the courts wouldn't have threatened them with billions in fines...
Yeah, because if you want to keep people from reading something except by your explicitly defined methods, putting it on the Internet is a great way to keep it locked down.
Idiots. Everything posted on the net is fair game, imho. Suggesting otherwise is just silly.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
They have taken plenty of action: they put up a web server and put up the stuff on the Internet.
Ahh yeah, just like how "being born", "getting a phone line and email address", and "living in a building" are actions that opt you in to everything under the sun in the US.
Then Belgian law is broken.
I'd take Belgian law over the US any day. Yes it's wrong in this one little particular case about robots.txt, but it's right in 99% of other opt-in cases.
This has nothing to do with privacy.
Yes it does. Opt-in is intended to ensure better privacy, by preventing the selling, sharing, or exploitation of private data unless the owner of that data allows it. Belgian law gets it 99% right; US law gets it 1% right.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.