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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.
I went over to www.google.be. No one will know what's going on--the whole thing is written in Belgian. Brilliant, Google!
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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.
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...
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
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.
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
....eh, fuck this. *cracks another one open*
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
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
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.
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.
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