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.).'"

Comments

Waffles

[bostons1337]

Don't they have anything better to do....like make us Americans some waffles.

$1,295 per day?

[Rude Turnip]

That's $472,675 per year, or, in Google's accounting terms, $0 after rounding to the nearest million.

Re:$1,295 per day?

[Anonymous Coward]

1,000 sites * $0 still = $0.

Ridiculous

[brunes69]

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.

Re:Ridiculous

[jandrese]

So the answer is obvious: Just delist these guys from Google entirely and configure the webcrawler to ignore them. Problem solved and you won't have to worry about them coming back later and claiming that your locally stored copy is also a copyright violation too.

What's the problem?

[DrEldarion]

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.

Re:What's the problem?

[91degrees]

It's basically about established practice. We've pretty much established right and wrong when copying a book. As a rule, you don't do it. In many countries, libraries and schools have a licencing agreement that allows photocopying. With TV shows it's considered perfectly acceptable to copy an entire show. Audio mix tapes are usually considered acceptable or explictely legal.

On the web, caching search engines have been in existence for a lot longer than expiring content has been around. It's established that search engines are a neccesity, and that robots.txt is the way to opt-out. When you do business in a new arena, it makes sense that the existing rules of the arena should apply.

Oblig Monty Python Reference

[Hoi Polloi]

"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!"

Just Pull Out

[Nom du Keyboard]

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.

Re:Personal Responsibility

[jandrese]

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.