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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.
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*.
Sorry that was the browser cache.
THIS is the correct tag:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
Sorry about the brain fart. I wish we could edit posts (preview, I know, but that would not have made me catch this one)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Actually, the action was begun by French- and German-language papers and adjudicated in a Brussels court, and thus has nothing to do with anything Flemish.
...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...
Yes it is different. In most countries, unauthorised distribution carries much heavier penalties than unauthorised possession (which may indeed have no penalty atttached at all).
"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.
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
Well, if the rightsholders doesn't want people/robots to access their "jewels" then maybe they shouldn't fucking publish them on a public net in the first place?
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn't that undermine the GPL? If the linux kernel is in the public domain, companies could use it freely without having to give back.
Or what about street-performers performing their own material?
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
Which is not only completely impractical (very few sites would set the "cacheme" flag because almost nobody would know about it), but counter to the way the internet works. By default you have to assume that anything you post on the internet will be tracked by search engines, blogged about, cached, etc... That happens to _everything_ on the internet, it's the nature of the beast. That's also why the internet works so well. If you want to make your page behave differently than all of the other pages on the internet, then you need to look into setting some very easy to use flags (robots.txt and the meta tags listed above) to change the behavior. You can't assume that just because it's yours that it will be treated specially. If you're really worried about it then don't post on the internet, plain and simple.
I read the internet for the articles.
Being the devil's advocate:
Spam is a free service which is optional. Email address owners have total control over it. Use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
Assuming those unsubscribe links would work (we all know they don't), would you consider this a logical way of thinking? If tomorrow some other caching company comes along and introduces another way in which website owners have 'total control', will that clear them from copyright violation? What if I want my content to be cached on proxies, but I don't like them to be accessible from a massively public accessible and searchable cache?
Personal opinion:
To be honest, I don't think Google needs to stop caching anything automatically. The ruling states copyright owners need to contact Google and Google needs to respond by taking the content offline within 24 hours. That doesn't seem completely impossible to do, and that way they can keep caching those who don't contact them.
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
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.
Posting on slashdot means never having to be embarrassed for not RingTFA.
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/
The way I see it, once you release media free of charge to the general public its content becomes public domain.
Then, perhaps its good that the rest of the world doesn't see it the way you do.
Because if the world were to be the way you see it, the entire web content industry would immediately go pay-per-view or subscription only to avoid all their work becoming public domain. Yes, what you propose would literally destroy the useful and open environment of the Internet.
Servers, bandwidth, and writers don't pay for themselves. If these sites can be copied wholesale and put up elsewhere without the original author having a say in the matter, you've just destroyed any monetary incentive to create. Much as many people like to think otherwise, money is important, and a strong incentive to create.
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..
Plus they actually authorized Google (and anyone else) to get the local copy.
: Sure, here you go! (200 OK HTTP response)
Google: Hey, what that page? Can I see? (HTTP GET)
Them
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."
No it wouldn't destroy it, it would change it, certianly.
Copyright has destroyed more then it has helped. I refer to what was happening before the revalutionary war.
This effect was curtailed by the 14 yaer limitation, but now that there isn't a real expiration date to copyright* it is happening again. Corporation are getting so much power that they are controlling culture.
Now, I don't agree with the original post about public domain, because by hos logic every book in a book store is public domain. I also believe a limited copyright is a good thing(14 years, 6 year extension). But if it became down to no copyright, and an unlimited copyright, I'll choose no copyright.
*Yes there is a limit, but for all intent and purposes it's meaningless.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
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.
> but as far as I know, robots.txt has no special status in law anywhere.
.cc from their results until such time as the local laws are corrected. Provided they exercised some good judgement on the selected date the local laws would get fixed.
Long accepted custom counts in most jurisdictions court systems. Especially in light of the default, everyone permitted. By making content available on a public web server you are obviously OK with anyone looking at it, Google included. If you don't want the big G looking, the accepted custom is to place a line into robots.txt telling that search engine to stay out. Of course no sane business would willingly disappear themselves from the net like that, so these guys want to dictate the TERMS under which Google indexes and presents their content.
Google should start making examples of some of these cases. Simply delete them. And ask for a declaratory judgement as to whether any other entity in that country can sue on similar grounds. If the court gives the wrong answer announce a near date when they will delete the entire
Governments will continue to try extending their tentacles into the network until the major stakeholders start kneecapping em at the first hint of interferrence.
Democrat delenda est