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Google Loses Cache-Copyright Lawsuit in Belgium
acroyear writes "A court in Belgium has found that Google's website caching policies are a violation of that nation's copyright laws. The finding is that Google's cache offers effectively free access to articles that, while free initially, are archived and charged for via subscriptions. Google claims that they only store short extracts, but the court determined that's still a violation. From the court's ruling: 'It would be up to copyright owners to get in touch with Google by e-mail to complain if the site was posting content that belonged to them. Google would then have 24 hours to withdraw the content or face a daily fine of 1,000 euros ($1,295 U.S.).'"
The ruling basically reiterates the current Google policy.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Don't they have anything better to do....like make us Americans some waffles.
I thought the whole EU had some sort of "fair dealing" exemptions. If they do, I can't believe that Google's lawyers lost this.
That is unfortunate, but I'm amazed caching is even legal in some (most?) countries. Its always seemed like it was just rampant copyright infringement to me, except of course the law in certain countries makes an exception for it.
That's $472,675 per year, or, in Google's accounting terms, $0 after rounding to the nearest million.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
If you can't cache content, then you can't search it.
You have to copy content to your local machine to index it, and to be abel to select results with context. Hell, you have to copy it to *VIEW* it.
The courts and the law need to wake up and realize you can't do anything with a computer without copying it a dozen times. 25% or more of what your computer does is copy things from one place (network, hard drive, memory, external media) to another.
I mean, they get to continue to cache. If they're told to remove it, they can. Or they can simply stop updating their database with any links to the companies site(s), just to make sure they don't accidentally infringe, and then the sites can start using robots.txt a little more successfully.
So Google lost some cache...they have a market cap of over $140 Billion, no biggie.
See my Home Theater
If they don't like it, they can very easily "opt out" by using Robots.txt to disallow Googlebot. I fail to see where the problem is here.
"Google would then have 24 hours to withdraw the content or face a daily fine of 1,000 euros ($1,295 U.S.).'""
I think it is safe to say they can afford to take their time...
[alk]
If I'm Google, I turn the morons off and see how fast they come screaming back when their ad revenue plummets. Seriously, IT'S FREE FREAKING ADVERTISING. Google should be charging *them*.
Just speculating... what happens when I REMEMBER the free version of the article? Am I now violating Flemish copyright laws?
This really seems to be the direction that things are going.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Google caching is a free service which is optional. Web site owners have total control over it. Note the following:
If this is in place the site does not get cached.
I hope Google is responding to such frivilous complaints and lawsuits by completely removing those sites from their index. If they do not remove those companies, they are doing evil through omission by allowing other companies to do evil to remain in business.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
See subject for text.
So now does Google block the entire country of Belgium in order to make sure they don't allow them to read cached material? If so, I say 'HA!'
The finding is that Google's cache offers effectively free access to articles that, while free initially, are archived and charged for via subscriptions.
The way I see it, once you release media free of charge to the general public its content becomes public domain.
If a publisher doesn't want their page cached there are technical measures they can and should take. The legal system isn't a crutch for idiots who can't tie their own shoelaces or wipe their own assholes. If an organization lacks the technical proficiency to publish on the web, they should stop publishing on the web. Search engine caches are an important and useful feature, being ruined for everyone because some stupid twat sees a payoff from Google.
...in the foot.
I don't believe that Google currently is mandated to show users any particular results. The simplest technological solution for Google might be to drop indexing the sites that send these takedown notices entirely. No index, no cache; dump it all and don't look back.
They are in no way legally bound to do come up with a more advanced solution that would be more $$ and add more complexity to the codebase.
Now because there very well may be information that is unavailable anywhere else (although it seems relatively unlikely - yes, they might have copyrighted articles that are unavailable otherwise, but I cannot imagine the information contained therein is such, unless you're talking about creative works) Google may try to work something out. Oh, that and they are remarkably not evil compared to the power they currently wield.
Imagine how many takedown notices they would receive after the first few rounds of companies that complained cannot be found through Google...
conspiracy?
h eglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070213.w2b elggoogle0213/BNStory/Business/home
http://209.85.135.104/search?q=cache:http://www.t
I'm for anything at all that will wake people up to the tyrrany of IP law. Keep it coming. Lockdown Windows. These are the things we need to provoke action, unfortunately. So, Bring it on! Until we puke.
What?
"Well now, the result of last week's competition when we asked you to find a derogatory term for the Belgians. Well, the response was enormous and we took quite a long time sorting out the winners. There were some very clever entries. Mrs Hatred of Leicester said 'Let's not call them anything, let's just ignore them.' and a Mr St John of Huntingdon said he couldn't think of anything more derogatory than Belgians. But in the end we settled on three choices: number three, the Sprouts, sent in by Mrs Vicious of Hastings, very nice; number two, the Phlegms, from Mrs Childmolester of Worthing; but the winner was undoubtedly from Mrs No-Supper-For-You from Norwood in Lancashire, Miserable Fat Belgian Bastards!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
>Google claims that they only store short extracts, but the court determined that's still a violation.
Abstracts are generally a) uninformative and b) free. Seems like a huge overreaction on the EU's part.
Google just makes a policy that they don't index any site that even once sends such a request. Problem solved. More seriously, maybe an extension to robots.txt that defines cache lifespan would be reasonable.
Can't google propose an extension of the robots.txt file format to allow the original publishers to set a time limit on when the search engines should expire the cache?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What do this say about proxy services, then? These also store content which may be subject to copyright and serve it to users.
If that is true, then why do I see copyright statements at the beginning of books and DVDs? It would seem the publishers are being hypocritical - they post their content publicly, refuse to use the robots.txt file, and then go on a litigation rampage when someone actually makes use of their web site. They're little different than the kid who takes his ball and goes home when he starts losing the game.
Furthermore, I would argue that posting to a web page is implied permission because the owners do so expecting their work to be copied to personal computers. In an interesting turn of events, private individuals are allowed to copy and archive web pages, but Google is not.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Am I misremembering, or wasn't it also Belgium that ruled against Lindows in the trademark lawsuit that Microsoft brought? (After a US court said essentially that since "windows" was an English word, MSFT didn't stand much chance of winning the US suit.)
If so, perhaps there's good reason that in "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", belgium is a swear word.
-- Alastair
I'm often getting irritated about that I find stuff with Google and then aren't able to read it. Who wants to find a short text describing what you're searching for, only to find out that I have to pay or go through some procedure to actually read the stuff?
I hope Google removes these sites totally. Then, as written by others too, we need a law that says that the ones putting stuff on the web has to write correct HTML and robot.txt files if they don't want their content cached. Google can't manually go through every site on the web and it would be even more impossible for Google's smaller competitors.
We call it a "Belgian Dip."
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Google ought to just pull-out from indexing anyone who complains about their methods. You effectively disappear off of the Internet w/o Google, and these whiny complainers deserve exactly that. Maybe after they've lived in a black hole for a while they'll realize the benefit of having their free material easy for web users to find and view.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If caching is copying, than every user who isn't watching a streaming feed -- which isn't the way text and single image pages are rendered -- is guilty of copyright infringement every time they view a page. Your browser makes a copy of the page on your own hard drive. Watch out!! Here come the lawyers now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If Google is not allowed to have any cache of these sites, then wouldn't that mean they would have nothing to index for their searches? If you send Google that email, and suddenly don't show up on any of their searches, congrats. On the plus side, no-one has access to your content anymore. On the downside, NO-ONE has any access to your content anymore, because no-one can find you.
Desired outcome/Wet dream... they want a big wad of Google's big pile of $$$$$
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think you mean recind. Resending means you'd send it to them again, even if you didn't want them to have it any longer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The word is rescind, folks.
*sighs sadly*
I personally live in Belgium, but I have to say that this comes as shock. I didn't hear a thing about this on the news yet and don't really understand what the court tried to achieve with this. As some have already pointed out, it has been google's policy for years.
Why should we have to opt out from being cached, why can't we opt in instead? I think the phone calls made by marketers are a perfect example of this. If you need your page to be found on Google or other search engines, add a meta tag, which explicitely lets a search engine to collect this page for indexing/caching. In fact allow these differences to be explicit, let search engines either index or cache or both.
You can't handle the truth.
If someone does not want their extracts caches, remove them ENTIRELY from google.
I don't believe that anyone has added "being indexed" to human rights yet.
D
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
Personally, I am a Belgian, and I am actually wondering why our newspapers just don't apply the same protection like, e.g., IEEE on their journals. You often get a Google hit to an IEEE paper on the IEEE server, but you then get the login page. Without password, you can't get access to the content. Of course, the copyrighted contents of IEEE is in the form of pdf's. Is it so much harder to protect html pages than pdf's?
Belgium is much smaller than than China, but the way they can have themselves delisted from Google is waaaaaaaay cheaper!
All jokes aside, the real issue here is whether a technical option to opt out of a certain practice (like using a robots.txt) is sufficient to avoid lawsuits. In this case it clearly is not, so I'm wondering if anyone who screws up his robots.txt can put down a claim against Google just like that? Get-rich-quick scheme or grey zone in some Belgian lawyer's head?
Speaking as a Belgian, the issue is serisouly blown out of reasonable proportion, and only the french speaking news-papers can think of such foolishness. But even though Google is supposed to be the "nice" company, delisting from big brother's great caches somehow also has a happy ring to it..
With great power comes great electricity bills.
I wonder what measures are in place to prevent abuse of this by non-owners of the materials. For example say I don't like what you wrote about me - could I tell Google that I own the content, please take it out of your cache. I'm fine with the idea that people should be able to say who does what with their original web content - but there are simple technical ways for them to prevent caching. So really this seems to just open the door to abuse ala the DMCA and Michael Crook.
I'm surprised courts approve of email, considering the occasional failure to deliver, and spoofing possibility. I thought that's what registered mail was for.
i don't like it. google should be able to cache away.
Your scenarios were
Copy (not steal)
Copy (not steal)
Copy (not steal)
Violence (and steal)
In the words of Sesame Street: one of these options is not like the others...
Your first three options were a breach of monopoly enforcement. Nothing NATURALLY stops you from copying (Do you ration a child's laughter or do you make more?). However, there is very naturally an ownership of self and items. Naturally, you cannot have my car when I have it.
I often search for stuff, and then Google lists some very promising searches, with a lot of relevant text in the description, but no cached version available. So I click on the link, and I get a "register/subscribe page" with totally NO SIGN of any of the text that previously appeared. Anyway this happens especially with journals.
I thought Google had a policy that a site was not allowed to show Google one thing and a normal user something else?
Or that policy has "Unless Google is paid off by said site" somewhere?
Anyway, ends up I need to skip all those sites and find a free site/page that deals with a similar topic.
I'd rather Google list sites that I can access for free above the sites which I can't.
I suppose I should go use the other search engines more regularly.
HTTP offers several standard headers to be interpreted by caches. The question is, does Google honour the instructions in those headers? On the other hand, content providers that serve content sensitive to cache problems are encouraged to correctly use those headers. Unfortunately (some/most?) content management systems do not provide means to control those.
Anti-photocopying paper would be the equivalent of some sort of technical means of preventing web spiders from accessing the page. The 'robots.txt' file is simply a machine-readable notification of the page owner's limits on how the content can be used, a lot like the notice printed in many books saying "No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher".
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
You see, in Belgium, it is physically impossible to use robots.txt, due to the odd shape of their Interweb tubes.
Believe it or not, there are quite some Belgians reading this.
I also don't agree to this.
Well, don't forget, this is just 1 company (which owns 15 newspapers or so)
1 Stupid company, throwing away all their free advertisement incomes, but still, 1 company, who doesn't represent all Belgians, which everyone seems to believe here.
Isn't this what robots.txt is for?
Sony ha
I keep waiting for Google to respond to one of these idiotic 'copyright' cases by simply removing service to IP address space associated with the country as an object lesson.
I can't imagine the Belgian public putting up for long with completely losing access to Google simply because their copyright laws were written in another century..
Caching _is_ Copyright infringement: Law simply can't keep pace with tech, especially international law.
Google should just drop all of the .be domain but still allow those sites who want to be cached to use a special "opt-in" string in robots.txt.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I get annoyed when they cache pages and then later those pages don't exist. If you do a Google image search, you still get the thumbnails of the images you were looking for. When you click on them you just get told the page doesn't exist or the image doesn't exist. It seems counter productive and wastes my time more often than not.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Why are European governments always messing with American companies? And furthermore, why should American companies care? Ooh, we're being fined in Euros. What if we don't pay? European governments have no authority over American companies, and I see no problem with just pulling out of any country that tries to push regulations like that.
I also think the idea of just permenantly delisting anyone who complains is great. Delist all of the Belgian government sites while you're at it.
and 'Belgians, Belgians, Belgians' screamed aloud?
Does the EU actually do anything these days aside from suing American companies for daring to do business in Europe?
Oh, wait, that's because harassing American companies is about the only thing all the members are ever able to agree on. Duh.
First, Google cache has a legitimate purpose.. when it finds a matching page and the page has dynamic content, the text you searched for may not be there when you click on the link, so you have to check the cache to see what the match was referencing... this happens a lot on blogs and html versions of newsgroups or mailing lists. If you can't find the original text you're going to go somewhere else, so this is beneficial to all.
Now, in order for content to be cached by Google, it has to be accessible to the webcrawler. This means it was available for free at some point, or the developers allowed special access for the webcrawler to index it (e.g. Salon.com). Either way, any half-way coherent developer knows that when the content is made pay-per-view, the cache is going to contain the content for some time. If they're still allowing it to be searched by bots and not giving access to humans, then screw them; They're going to extra effort to assist search engine code to infringe their copyrights.
There's no legislation in place, as far as I know, as to when caches must be cleared after access privileges change. Who's fault is this? Google's?
True, there is copyright infringment going on, but it's usually for the benefit of the public and the copyright holder, as per my first paragraph. A lawsuit would only open the door for more lawsuits and be at a general disadvantage for users of the internet. Instead of allowing the lawsuit, they could impose stricter guidelines on how webpages communicate with search engines. Meta-tags could state explicitly when searching must stop on the page in question and hence when caches must be cleared, or if publicly viewable caches are allowed at all.
Maybe Belgium should sue the w3c?
It seems to me, and I could very well be wrong, that Belgium needs Google more than Google needs Belgium. If I were at the helm of google, I'd probably just avoid the undesirable fine structure that the Belgian courts propose and just pull out of Belgium...After all, then the fine folks of Belgium can decide which is worse, google's caching, or no google at all...
Well if they want to be assholes about it, why not just drop them off of the database completely?
It seems to me that Google is in a good position now to offer a deal to sites; they can either agree to be crawled, and thus end up in a cache for 30 days or whatever, or they can just not end up in the index at all. Their option.
Get rid of the "oh we want to be in the index and get traffic, but not be cached" option, which is basically web sites wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
I think these sites have an inflated opinion of their own relevance to the world. They can sue Google, but Google can effectively remove them from the Internet, at least as far as 70-90% (depending on who's doing the counting) of users are concerned.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Here is what they said in an interview published on Groklaw. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200610110 8382797
"23:35
MB: Because their theory has always been to say: we take, and if you don't agree, you have to contact us, and we will then remove your content. But if you enter into that logic, you admit that it's normal what they do. So we said "No". That's not how it works. It's you who has to come to us to request authorizations, and possibly pay us, or negotiate a sales agreement, which could take any form you choose; it could be sharing advertising receipts, it could be a joint-venture with a common entity -- everything is possible. Everything is possible. But it's in this sense that it should work." (MB is Margaret Boribon of Copiepresse)
It seems to me that they were wanting a slice of the financial action.
This part of the interview "Because their (Google's) theory has always been to say: we take, and if you don't agree, you have to contact us, and we will then remove your content." seems to be what the ruling states.
My faith is expressed through Nihilism. Do you understand?
Funny - most online newspapers and the like seem to, from what I can tell, make their articles fully available to Google from an SEO side of things but want the consumer to not see the same article... They probably just look for the Google browser string and allowo that to see the articles.
IMO if a site allows Google to see it, they should allow users to see it too, otherwise Google yields too many false positives.
Tough shit IMO for the site that wants to have its cake and eat it too.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I mean it.
Let them drop off the face of the 'Net.
Then if they complain, fuck 'em.
Its their laws, its their problem.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
....archive.org
You did "opt in," by broadcasting your shit on the Internet in the first place!
Don't like it? Don't upload it! Why is that simple concept so fucking hard to understand?!
I mean, jeez -- don't you realize that what you're saying is equivalent to yelling in my ear and then complaining that I heard you?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Here's how to fix the problem. When such a page would be linked to in the cach, instead put up the following:
This page is cached, but your government officials will not let you read it. Here are their names and addresses, and the date of the next election, and the challengers to them who have signed a document that they will reverse this ruling if elected:
Censor: Hercule Poirot
Free Speech Challenger: Agatha Christie
Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007
Censor: Phinneas d'Satay
Free Speech Challenger: Mannequin Pisse
Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007
etc.
Tailor it per local region if that can be determined from the IP.
9) Wait a few years
10) Profit!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Outrageous. They obviously don't understand the feature Google provides. Google is only providing a part of the article. They get free exposure from it. People will bitch about anything. Including getting free money obviously.
because they copy and cache.
4) Profit!
Note to smart-ass AC parent: I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know, robots.txt has no special status in law anywhere. That's not to say that it is irrelevant. For example, you might reasonably assume that in the presence of a robots.txt file that specifically permits something, the site owner has actively given consent to that action using a recognised protocol that they understood. However, the absence of a robots.txt prohibiting indexing/caching/reproducing and selling a site most certainly does not imply consent to do those things. Copyright is opt-out, not opt-in, and has been for several years just about everywhere.
This being the case, I share the view of aussie_a in the first post to this thread: it's amazing anyone ever considered Google Cache legal in most jurisdictions. Just because they call it a cache does not mean that it actually is a cache in the usual sense of the technical term. In fact, it demonstrably isn't. For a start, it still doesn't seem to duplicate any images and plug-in content, referring to the original page for those. That both wiping out any dubious claims about providing a mirror service if the original site goes down and makes Google guilty of one of the oldest and most anti-social dirty tricks on the web, all in one go. Moreover, Google Cache does not reproduce web pages unmodified: it plants a huge great Google banner across the top of the page.
I've been saying for a while that Google have crossed the invisible line on copyright with several of their services. It only amazes me that it's taken this long for a major court ruling against them to arrive.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't normally comment on these things, but it's deeply ironic that the parent post has been moderated (-1, Redundant). It is, in legal fact, one of relatively few accurate posts in this discussion, making it (+1, Informative). Moreover, looking at the number of people posting here who clearly do not appreciate this fact, it's clearly not (-1, Redundant).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They're also trying to get rid of countries in Europe and form on Super Country. Sorta like a certain person tried in the 30s.
They shouldn't be so surprised at Google hq.
I bet they knew it was illegal in Europe before they even started news.google.(eu country).
Several European news scrapers exist right now, perfectly legal.
There was a case in 2000 where kranten.com got sued by 6 dutch newspapers (english translation of the verdict
for deeplinking to articles. Since then, we know pretty much what we can and can't do.
You can deeplink to articles if you supply the source, and if it opens in a new window. In Denmark someone was found guilty when using frames, and 'thus made it look like the articles where from his website'.
Now consider, Europe doesn't have a "Fair Use" policy, that' the United States. By caching articles, Google went way over the line if you look at it from this perspective, doesn't it?
Cutting of .be would be spiteful. Yes, their hits would go way down, but so would Goggle's shared revenue (assuming the news and info sites have Goggle ads). ... also grumbling about having to retest a lot of java applications after the daylight savings patches are applied to the web servers
- since proxies are your friend, belgians do not loose actually access to google. Filtering ip address space is useless. It's not the internet which is cut of. Just a foreign compagny barred from a local market.
- if google stops indexing belgian sites, not much info gets lost to belgians, belgium is real small. 99% of the content is outside . So 99% of the info is preserved for them
- belgian content is protect while the rest of the world is free to access. Belgians are free to put content on servers outside of belgium which they choose to share with the the nessecary pointers to the paying belgian parts. They can even provide serverspace to content providers and give them prove their content is lawfully protected.
- they get a warm and cosy feeling about no longer being indexed by the big brother network
Just disable the cache link for everyone in Belgium. On an unrelated note, I just found out that copyright in Bulgaria never expires, but is instead assigned to the government if the author dies and there's noone to inherit it, and anyone who wants to use anything with expired copyright must ask the govt for permission. And they dare say that conforms with EU laws....
What should people who are interested in a paper but not currently seeking a degree (e.g. already graduated) do?
The journals are often in the library stacks and accessible by anyone, just like books and magazines. Of course I am used to dealing with State Universities where you can just walk in, I'm not sure what private Universities tend to do.
If you are in need of some service, such as inter-library loan, then you may be able to obtain that service as a benefit of alumni membership.
The problem with your idea is not that its a breach of agreement between Google and the company but a breach of trust between Google and me. We all know that Google had invested a significant amount of money in creating their search algorithms and up until today they have almost always returned good results. Now although there is no legal agreement if Google decides to start shutting out websites simply because of a disagreement between the two how do I know that the results I'm getting are really the most relavent sites? And furthermore Google is aware of this and so no they shouldn't and no they won't be shutting anybody out any time soon.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
You mean a federation like the United States of America? Headed by a oil-hungry aggressor like George W. Bush? Or do you mean the trade block, union of independent nation states (non-federal), called the European Union?
... if Microsoft weren't a neo-conservative fascist's wet dream
Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel, Dianne Feinstein, Edward Kennedy, etc will be shocked to find out they are neo-con fascists. They all take Micorosoft's money. Of course, Microsoft's involvement is natural given the governments suits against them, they tried to avoid Washington DC but that was naive I suppose.
Google should move their sites to the top in listings such as:
Crybabies
Technologically Inept
Failed Business Plan
Silly Europeans
NOARCHIVE stops caching
NOSNIPPET stops even the little snippet on the search page.
If you tell Google NO with these tags, Google will respect it.
Thus no infringement - isn't it a part of civil law that a would be plaintiff needs to do something to prevent the harm - e.g. if my car has an oil leak due to a defect and I deliberately wait until the engine seizes, I can't collect damages for that.
I wish I could tell Google to ignore pages with nosnippet and noarchive so I don't get those cloaked pages that contain my term, but when I get there it is just a demand for subscription, and no article and the cache was turned off with those directives, to "tease" one into visiting the site.
In a near perfect world Google would just delist any site that doesn't give it archive privilege, but I'd settle for being able to set my search defaults to ignore noarchive sites. They want to play games, to hell with them.
And every site that does the cloaking I mentioned above is in violation of Google rules and I report them.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The US DMCA under Clinton in 1998 is a part of it too.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
No more Google for Belgium. It is about time that Google flexes its muscle against some of this political BS that is flying around. Google Inc is FAR more powerful then the government of Belgium, not to mention the loss of that market has little effect on Google International.
The bottom line here is that Belgium needs Google FAR more then Google needs Belgium.
Like most people, I'm tempted to think people who disagree with me are just plain stupid. Time and time again (and much to my chagrin) I've discovered there actually are two sides to a story. I've learned to be a bit more open-minded in my old age...
With that said, I can't seem to figure out the non-Google side of this issue. Why *would* the Belgians pursue this case? I can't figure out the financial angle of a) pursuing this lawsuit, and b) reducing ad traffic. Can anyone help me understand the other side of the issue? What's really in it for the newspapers?
Goog point Another formulation of the problem is that Google should update their cache more often. A number of papers offer their articles for free for 3 days, but you must pay for access to older articles (e.g. www.independent.co.uk and their "Portfolio"), so they won't complain about this being cached as long as it is deleted after it ceases to be cached when it becomes inaccessible to the public. On the other hand, speaking from a position of technical ignorance, are there meta-tags that could provide this kind of expiration info on a page/user basis? If so, perhaps it's an education issue; if not, then there should be!
He was a man who didn't know the meaning of the word "fear"; or the meaning of many other words longer than 3 letters
I understand that the problem here is Google indexing content right after it gets his claws on it, and that this ruling is probably nothing but a desperate way to get some money from them.
However, there are many technical ways to not get cached, and robots.txt / meta-tags were just plainly covered in other replies. But if they were so unwilling to have their abstracts in search engine cache, they could truly have used what makes the "success" of those Web 2.0 sites, by using a Javascript trick or any other way of this kind to display text... I don't know yet of web search engines that properly execute JS, and make use of AJAX.
Yes, this would mean also that this case was not only intended to get money from Google but really to protect IP...
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I can't search. I uninstalled Google. - P. Ducler
bcause the Constitution didn't get approved, but just you wait!
So, the suggestions that people just use noarchive meta-tags or robots.txt files is as infeasible as suggesting that Google block them from indexing.
Amusingly, the Belgian courts answer of "you have to honor takedown requests" is just the right backhanded slap to them.