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Google News Found Guilty of Copyright Violation
schmiddy writes "A court in Brussels, Belgium, has just found Google guilty of violating copyright law with its Google News aggregator. According to the ruling, Google News' links and brief summaries of news sources violates copyright law. Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs. Although Google plans to appeal, this ruling could have chilling effects on fair use rights on the web in the rest of Europe as well if other countries follow suit."
So is this where 'Belgium!' becomes the most obscene word in the cosmos?
Is this any different from http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/13/13 44248yesterday's story or has Google been involved in multiple court cases in Belgium?
Maybe Google should just delink the sites altogether, that way the offended media organizations can watch their traffic plummet to zero?
I'm not sure how much aggregation Google news does, but I'd think if they're copying in less than 10% or so of the story and providing a link to the original they'd be safely in the "fair use" arena.
I suspect this has more with newspapers getting annoyed that people are starting to type in "[MyCity] news" in Google more often than looking up their local newspaper's web site. The newspapers also would like to restrict access to their "archives" (which they regard as a pay-to-see resource).
Slashdot said $1250/day yesterday and $32,600/day today. Will hate to see how much they loose a day for copyright violations in about a week!
1) make any sort of "news alike" copyrighted content. Does not matter quality as long as there is quantity.
2) MAKE SURE that my robot.txt allow google.fr to index
3) wait
4) leave the content at the same place but put a password
5) sue google.fr for copyright infringement.
6) profit
Strange, I think I forgot the ?? step somewhere...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Sounds like they're biting the hand that feeds them. There was a rush of articles a while back where web analysts were blaming google for being a sort of web vampire/leech, sucking the blood out of websites without providing anything back. Those claims have quited because businesses realized that when they changed their model to accommodate the search centric interweb, times were good.
You leave google, google leaves you. Buh-bye, thank-you for flying the interweb air, we hope you enjoyed your time on interweb and also hope to see you again soon.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Are going to destroy the world as we know it. ( well, that and the lawyers ).
Its more insidious then any terrorist group, or rouge nation.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes. Yes they do. Socialism has always been "big business OMG EVIL CAPITALISTS STABBITYSTABSTAB DIE DIE DIE" regardless of the particular merits or vices of the business in question. Except when the Big Business in question is The Government. Then it's all okay.
Can you say 'retarded judge'?
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
This reminds me of when France was going to force Apple to open iTunes, and Apple said fine, we'll leave. Or when the EU took on Microsoft. Once companies get to be a certain size, its really difficult for countries to control them, especially when the controls will end up hurting their corporate citizens, as in this case. When Google stops linking to their newpapers, the newspapers will feel the pain, not Google. Especially since all of Google's competitors will have to play by the same rules, and can't provide unique content. If the governments were right in these cases, and could take the moral highground, then they might stand a chance of winning. However, by continuing to fight huge tech companies in these areas, where they can't win, they stand to lose the power to fight when it really matters. Also, in each case, there were other ways of dealing with the problem. Don't like MS bundling? Move the government to Linux, save money, and encourage your population to do the same. Don't like iTunes and the way Fairplay is locked down? Start a competitor, or encourage the labels to stop their love affair with DRM. Don't like Google lnking to news stories? Update your robot.txt to prevent cache's and Google indexing your site to begin with. Of course, they know they can't do that. They want to come up on Google searches, but not have Google index their content as well. Would you like to have that cake you just ate, anyone?
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
I find it difficult to reconcile because I think of the internet far more as a conversation than a transmission. And so passing on links and summaries is more like repeating in abbreviated form something you overheard (or were in the audience for) in your own words but with enough extra info they can go and look for themselves.
Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs.
;)
That's awfully close to a nerd number: 2 to the power of 15 = $32,768 [1]. We are talking about computers here, and there's nothing computers like more then binary numbers! Maybe the court was being generous by choosing a slightly lower number. What do you think Google will do with that *extra* $168 dollars a day they are not being charged?
[1] For the fun of it, I used Google Calculator to give the proof, and yes the Caret symbol is really a bitwise operator but not according to Google Calculator. I suppose one could say that Google is guilty of "Bitwise Violation" also...but that's for another article
.. to title this story "Brussels Sprouts Stink"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
This has nothing to do with fair use. Google is using copyrighted material to turn a profit. We're not talking about some not for profit blogger here or a journalist sighting portions of an article on some other site to further a point. This is Google using copyrighted material to turn a profit in the form of increased advertising revenue and the company in question has every right to sue to prevent others from profiting from content that they have created.
Belgium isn't a socialist country. I'll refrain from the usual anti-american comments, though they've rarely been more adequate.
Belgium is a constitutional monarchy, and it's current prime minister is a member of the VLD party, which started out as a right-wing party and has since moved towards a centrist view.
You can read it all on Wikipedia if you spend 30 seconds looking for it. Provided you don't consider reading a socialist skill.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
slashdot: Belgium
aepervius: google.fr
I'm guessing you're one of the 75% of Yanks who thinks "passport" is a request to share fortified wine, right?
Clue: google.be en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium
Differences between France and Belgium:
* Most Belgians speak Dutch, not French.
* In Belgium's extremely long varied history of occupation, the French occupied it for less than 25 years.
* Belgium still has a King. France killed all of theirs more than two hundred years ago.
* Belgium is NOT famous for good food. Trust me on this one. Typical menu: Ham and cheese with fries. Cheese fries with ham. Ham and fries with cheese. Pick any combination of the three. The fries are more like British "chips" except they are fried twice to make them crispier.
If they don't want to be scanned by google, create the file.
If they do want to be scanned (and therefore indexed as well as cached) then don't.
Although, I for one, would prefer that we would have to *create* the file, and add entries that could say:
Scan=Yes
Index=Yes
Cache=No
If no robots.txt file is found, then do nothing for the site.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
The presence of a monarch and/or prime minister makes no difference at all in practice.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs.
FROM: Eric Schmidt
TO: All Google Employees
Beginning today, employees will no longer be eligible for free Kona coffee and hourly massages. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Now, who started getting antsy and throwing their weight about? The tinpot newspapers, that's who. So it seems fair enough to me - they cried that google linked to them, so if google stop linking to them they can stop with the boo-hoos already. Be careful what you wish for.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, yes, by definition socialists are trying to take control of production out of the hands of large businesses and into the hands of the workers. That being said, Belgium is a pretty moderate country as far as Europe goes.
Please debate on the merits of the case, not on stereotypes and idealogical generalizations.
You live in Belgium, excellent.
Have you ever lived in an actual socialist country, to compare?
I'm a German, we've had an excellent long-term experiment in socialism in a part of our country. My family has friends from Russia. An ex-girlfriend of mine was from Poland and my wife's family is from Romania. I'm entirely certain that in order to consider western European countries "socialist", you have to have an extremely tainted, simplified and biased view of the world - and absolutely zero first-hand experience of actual socialist countries.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Could it be that they actually WANT to be available to search engines? Can't have it both ways.
[from google's blog]
If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content. These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines.
In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index--all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.
You are confusing communism with socialism, which only shows how effective the dis-information campaign of the "conservatives" has been over the years. Socialism is merely concerned about organizing things in such a way that some basic functions of society take precedence over personal greed. It is quite possible to have small/medium sized private enterprise in a socialist country, the criterion is not the word "private" but the overall offect on society such operations have. Since gigantic mega-businesses do impact society in significant ways (mostly negatively) that automatically produces a desire to counter-act these activities by the socialists. That is why socialists are likely to be for nationalization of major assets such as natural resources, roads etc. But they will not be so inclined when it comes to bakeries, grocery stores, muffler shops and the like.
I recall seeing this exact situation played out in some flash video that was trying to predict the future of the internet, google in particular. Anyone else see it? The only difference was that in the video it was the NY times that was suing google.
Meta, Meta, Meta
If I have a news article on my site, I want people to come to my site to read it. Why? Simple. I got advertising up there. However, when people don't come to my site, I lose money. And if they're going to google instead of my site for the story, then I do blame google. Personally, I've got my eye on Sentinel from http://www.blogwerx.com/ - they were at the Demo Conference this year, and I'm looking forward catching me some sploggers!
Fair use & copyright are "unkown" terms in Belgium (and most of the non-anglosaxon world), but we have equal (or more) rights for authors AND users. It's only a difference of naming the whole thing.
Authors, artists & producers.. have a lot of rights in Belgium, but users (listeners, etc..) can freely use excerpts, quotes, etc.. for schools, reports, books, scientific research. We even have the right to copy a cd for personal use..
Other important things about this topic :
And please, stick to the main topic. Belgium is a small, but beautifull country full of the best beer in the world, best chocolate.. and a governement existing of socialists AND right wing liberals.
If nothing happens in Belgium - why did Caesar call us the bravest?
Oh, but the government has our best interests at heart. Who knows better than a faceless bureaucracy? On a side note - I imagine that many /.ers who currently rail against capaitalism would have a complete turn-around with their first IPO.
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
linking to an external site doesnt break a copyright, if the site that is being linked to has the system in place to disable a page after a certain amount of time (which is what the whole argument is over). so, google can link to the pages all they want, as long as they dont display any of the material longer than it is publicly available on the original site.
portfolio
Sure, but other countries have similar code. Things like "fair dealing" and "Limitations and exceptions to copyright." Of course IANAL, and some of my info came from wikipedia (that bastion of truth and NPOV).
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
This is just another good example of companies who want to live in the old way the are used to doing business. Sure their profits are shrinking but they will shrink just as fast if Google doesn't use their news. I would guess (based on no facts) that this will hurt them, it will only cut the number of people that have the chance to get to their site which means less ad revenue for them. Google news is more like the yellow pages than anything. I look up what I need then call them or in this case go to there site to meet my specific needs.
Are you an idiot, or do you just play one on slashdot?
If Google were to delist these Newspapers, that would not be an attack on the Newspapers. Google does not need a court ruling to delist anyone, so why should they go to the courts to do so? If Google feels they benefit from listing the 'papers, Google is free to appeal the court ruling. Otherwise, why should Google go through that expense?
People may make fun of the kid who takes his marbles and goes home, but only an idiot like you would claim he needs a Court's permission to do so.
You do mean 'rogue' don't you? Or is this some joke that sailed above my head?
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
Howdy folks.
:)
It's time for today's top Slashdot humor tip. When someone references HHGTG, make sure that you understand the reference before slagging the OP.
=====> Joke
O
/ \
/ | \
/ \
Apparently you have never been on the recieving end of real "force." I don't believe the poster was advocating a scenario where Google sends in their security force to kick ass. And the "Wild West" - dude - people got shot and killed in the Wild West (in fact I live in the town where the first actual "shoot-out" supposedly occured). How does that have anything to do with Google delisting some news site?
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
The best analogy is not a fence, but a "no trespassing" sign. If you put up that "no trespassing" sign using the robots.txt file/Robot Exclusion Protocol, then you do expect people to honor that.
If you put a site up on the public internet, you would commonly expect people to visit it and do search-engine-like things to it (including saving a copy to disk).
My US version of Google News does NOT offer links to cached articles, as Google's traditional search engine does.
http://www.out-law.com/page-7759 has a good summary
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Google is run by a lot of really bright people. It would be seemingly trivial for them to develop a natural language parsing engine that would "rewrite" the introduction or summary for linked stories. Perhaps even condense them so that a realistic summary will fit in the few lines provided for each story on google news. After all, copyright law is only violated when something is copied verbatim; if it is rewritten, then no actual copying takes place. You may run into some issues regarding the thumbnailed images but I think that, too, could be overcome (make them greyscale and cropped differently, for example).
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Well, I probably phrased that a little poorly. I didn't mean to imply that socialism always equals communism. It's just that socialists believe the workers should share in the control of production (either through government control, trade unions, etc.). Obviously there is a wide range in this, from US style socialism (not much) all the way to communism.
mod parent and gp up for funny AND insightful posts.
What defines a Socialist country is who owns the means of production and the lack of right to private property.
High taxation, bureaucracy and big public sector are not characteristics exclusive of a socialist country.
Heck, taxation, as a matter of fact, can be low or non existent in a socialist country, since all the services provided by the state do not need to be paid with taxes, but with production output.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yeah, because legal always equals good and illegal always means evil.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That was about a year ago... and google delisted all belgian sites the same day... serves them right...
by the way this ruling did NOT have chilling effects on fair use rights on the web in the rest of Europe...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
"Google is using copyrighted material to turn a profit"
:-)
Of course, it's copyrighted material, even if they don't make a profit. I mean, you are aware that copyright handles the right to copy, and not whether you make a dime of it? For instance, if I was copying a book and gave it away for free, it STILL would be copyright-infringement, and the authors still could sue me.
Therefor, I'm glad to see you are a staunch believer in protecting copyrights. This post you are reading, btw, is also copyrighted. And your browser just made a copy of it.
Feel free to pay me 2,6 euro for the copyrights of this post. Thank you!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
This just screams for a "You must be new here" comment.
This is Slashdot, most every view is extremely tainted, simplified and biased. No experience whatsoever is needed. I thought that was a condition for admission?
Withdrawal of reward is not the same as use of force. There are two issues at hand here, the judge in this case only ruled on one of them, copyright. No ruling is needed on the other, which is whether google wants to continue using their resources that they have paid for to support companies that attack them. In the "Wild West" we had shootouts in the street. The option we are discussing here is the equivalent of taking your ball and going home because you don't like the way the game turned out. Perhaps not the most mature option, but it's your fucking ball!
By your logic, people sued by the recording industry have a moral obligation to continue purchasing music. By what moral reasoning do you arrive at the conclusion thatno longer wanting to do business with people who have sued you is the moral equivalent of forming a lynch mob and hanging someone?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Um, Socialism has a whole spectrum of definitions. France and Sweden call themselves socialist, aren't too hard for a Belgian to visit, and are very similar in practice to what the gp described (high taxes, large public sector, etc.). Also, I don't know why Russia, Poland, Romania, or the now historical East Germany would have been called socialist in the past. They went right past socialist and straight to dysfunctional communism.
But, like I originally said, I suspect it all depends on your definition... Most of the readers here will accept that Western Europe is mostly socialist and that Eastern European countries are still figuring things out after their experience with communism (not socialism). But I do remember that the USSR stood for "United Soviet Socialist Republics", even though nobody in the West ever really bought the assertion that the USSR was a socialist state... so clearly it isn't only you.
Regards,
Ross
are business schools really churning out graduates that are this stupid? Are they actually teaching people that litigation is a valid income generation model? Its free adverstising for gods sake, not lost revenue. Doesnt anyone see the flawed logic in the lost revenue thinking? 1) Its free advertising, my guess is a link on google news actually brings in more revenue and 2) Who the hell would come to your lame ass news site if they werent referenced to it from google? I know I wouldnt go to half the news sites I go to if they werent referenced on google news, because I never would have heard of them. I can understand the *IAA using this kind of flawed logic, snorting coke off of hookers asses all day has to have an detrimental effect on a persons cognitive processes. But this? This is just ridiculous. I hope they go out of business.
I hope that dozens of media outlets across Europe block all search engines from listing them. That way their web sites will become cob webs and smarter media will allow search engines to freely list their web site and drive tons of traffic to their web site. Face it Google, MSN and yahoo are providing free advertising to these media outlets.
A smart business man in Belgium will set up a site and allow the search engines to freely list the articles and media content and drive the rest of the media out of business.
No. But getting taking it upon yourself to punish those you disagree with is evil. And accepting legal judgements stoically is not evil.
I suppose you were being humorous, right? They're the same case, just read TFAs. Or check http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
___
*insert sig here*
I don't think the guy with the 3digit UID is new... but I hope that's why you didn't actually make a "You must be new here" comment...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Grrrr...
:)
But it did make it pretty funny
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, hold on. You're saying it's bad to be anti-social, but good to be anti-socialist? I'm so confused!
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Nice insight there. Wish I had mod points.
Of course, I don't understand what it is about passing age forty that makes so many people apathetic towards new technology and ideas - they're the ones who are largely in control of the direction of the world, and they almost always need to know about the new stuff to do their jobs.
It's just damned retarded.
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You better not be making money out of Slashdot ;-)e -google-decision-means-for-social-media.html
http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/what-th
Your argument was good and almost convincing until the last part. You see, Google isn't doing business with these people. And that's the whole point of it. That's what they wanted Google to do - do business with them, i.e. get a share of what Google makes in profit thanks to the news they publish.
It's not Google stopping to buy their newspapers, as per your example. Rather on the contrary - stopping to do that (without paying) was what the case was all about.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Force doesn't have to be physical. It can be psychological (talk to any mobbing victim if you don't believe that) or money/market based (talk to Stacker, Netscape, Novell's DRDOS department - if you can find any of them).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Ok, I realize that "socialist" has very different meanings on either side of the atlantic ocean. I haven't heard France nor Sweden call themselves socialist, and I live within a thousand miles or so of both. But I might be mistaken, it's not as if I study either country.
Most of the communist countries, however, did call themselves socialist. There are also fairly strong socialist parties in most of Europe. However, pretty much every adult member of society realizes they are about as socialist as the "christian democratic union" of Germany is christian (which is: Not that any difference is visible. It's historic baggabe from back in the early 50s when they joined with a centrist christian party, but let's cut the history lesson short).
Almost everything the average american appears to consider "socialist" is considered centrist in Europe. Health care, for example. Maybe that's why our system is slightly less broken than yours. Gun control is just common sense if you consider that Europe has a much higher concentration of cities than the USA (and let's face it, owning a couple guns isn't as much of a problem somewhere out in Texas as it is somewhere down in the Bronx).
Anyways, without an objective definition of "socialist", the argument probably rests on semantics.
However, I still object to the use of the word in this context, because about half the time some dofus from southern Texas uses it, it's means as an insult, not as a political classification.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The argument that a crime for the sake of the public good has been discussed extensively by the ancient greek. It's one of those which can not be objectively concluded, but all legal systems based on the roman code of laws has realized that you can not let people off because their crime benefited someone or even everyone. You might lower his punishment, but not too much.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They are doing business with them in the same sense television stations do business with you. They provide you with a free service. In exchange, they deliver your attention to advertisers. Even though you do not pay them, you are an integral part of their business method. Even though these online services do not pay google, google is providing them with a service, delivering hits. In exchange, Google gets the traffic that comes in search of them. If google wants to forgo listing them on Google's servers then that is Google's business. These companies that took google to court want to eat their cake and have it too. They don't want Google to cache their content, but they want Google to list them. The court has ruled they can't cache content, fine. It's not Google's content. But Google no more has to list these companies than you do. Would you enjoy being forced toadvertise for people who not only aren't paying you, but take you to court?
Now, if a court decides Google is a monopoly, and abusing their monopoly power, then that would change things. Google could not will-nilly decide not to list people. But until then, they most certainly can decide what to do with their equipment. Not that they will do that, it would hurt them as much as the people that took them to court. It's just that, from a moral standpoint, I can't see anything wrong with google de-listing anyone that pisses them off, or for any other reason including them just having a bad day. I'd be kind of angry with them if they started doing stuff like that, but I wouldn't say they were doing evil, just being annoying.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Im surprised at this ruling. It seems RSS / Atom-feeds has just been made illegal in belgium, or am I missing something?
The courts should not address issues it has no understanding of. It should consist of younger people for technology-related rulings.
It doesnt even fit this particular scenario. Google News is almost unreadable already, the snippets they cut from each news source is just a few words, and most often not even complete sentences. It is more of a free advertisement for the News agencies, because to get the story, or get any meaning out of it, you need to click the link. Such short snippets should be ruled as fair use, and the Google News should really be longer to be actually readable, but IANAL or a judge for that manner, so who can fathom the reasoning behind it?
But of course, there will always be rulings going against common sense, but today, it will get more light and fame, so there are really more checks and balances today than say 100 years back.
Maybe Google should just stop the feeds for those agencies that are suing, and when they see their traffic fall, they will beg to be listed on Google again. I remember this happened for some similar scenario of linking to news a year ago or so.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I am very sorry to break it to you but Belgium have several layers of government and the part of Belgium that copiepresse works is the French spoken part commonly known as Vallonia. Vallonias government is socialist even though the Federal government is a coalition since there are no single party big enough to run the country. Several partys in the coaliton are socialist.
This is issue with google is more likely a stupid atempt at getting money from big business without understanding that it hurts their business. Their core readers buy the paper version like "normal people" and we need to remember that computer literacy in this part of Belgium is nothing like the north end of the country.
- From the perspective of capitalism, the only factor of importance is profitability of a business. That means that the business must be nice (or succesfully deceitful) to its customers. How it treats its employees (they might be indentured slaves) or how does it treat its neighbours or environment is irrelevant (because it usually does not impact sales -- sad but true)
- To a socialist, this is unacceptable because such a business is a bad member of the society. The problem is not the "profit" part (or "ownership", or "control" parts) but how does this business go about procuring it. Subsequently socialists will seek to empower the employees (via unions, or regulations or what not) and to restrict the environmental damage (by regulation, taxation penalties and what not). Note that the "control of means of production" is not a part of the equation.
- To a communist the very idea of a "business" run for profit (instead of the benefit of humanity) is abhorrent. Means of production are all "owned" by the workers (meaning all of the workers, not just the ones working in a particular place). A communist society does not feature competition for survival between various worker-controlled factories etc. The idea (a rather naive one) was that the meticulous planning and analysis of needs of the society and allocation of resources will take place of the capitalist-style competition. That is why many of the original communist ideologies involved abolishment of money.
In other words communism and socialism are not just two stops on the same scale, they are two different worldviews, each concerned with different aspect of human behaviour (one with kind, humane society and the other with "ownership" of things, allocation of products etc). Few of the remedies to some of the problems they seek to address can coincide but that is a result of the fact that they both originated as a response to the same defficiencies of industialized societies. Note that communist theoreticians also tended to be socialists since they hoped that their money-less utopia would turn out kind to its members...How about quoting? Is this no longer alowed outside the educational realm? If I quote someone as part of a link, that would be wrong? Slashdot is in for it then too.
This is bigger than on the face of it seems and it is merely the newspapers attempt to get some of google's cash, which is ok by me cause google should just cut them off and blacklist them. Bye bye paper goodbye.
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
Regards,
Ross
Their own damn fault for putting RSS feeds and all that stuff for Google to find.
This Frantic Industries (http://franticindustries.com/blog/2007/02/14/no-
Seriously, guys. Grow up.
"A court in Brussels, Belgium..."
"...Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day..."
Ummm, how exactly are they going to FORCE Google to pay? I suppose Belgium could force Google to close any branch offices they might have in Belgium, and they could certainly take China's approach of setting up a national firewall to try and keep traffic to Google blocked... but forcing them to pay? They can bombard the Google headquarters with legal requests, and spam the US courts to try and bring a suit against them in the US, but what else can they actually do?
One supposes the Dictator of Sealand could decide he hates Microsoft and will FORCE them to pay $1000 a day until they fix the product they sold him?
If you can't trust them in one area why trust them at all. Why take a chance? Just flush the cache and don't spider the entire country ever again. Of course you also don't want to have the cache tainted by them so you block anyone who even thinks of having Belgium URLs or content on their site.
..."Of course you can _opt in_ for a small fee"...
Google should have done this to the pr0n industry as well.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Yes, I am a part of their business. Which is exactly what this lawsuit was all about. The newspapers were complaining that Googles business consisted of using copyrighted text from their webpage, without permission or giving them a share of the profits.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Everyone should have a right to copy.
Use force? Google is providing a free service for this company by listing their website on the front of news.google.com It's the company using force because they think they're losing out on something. If they're wrong they're gonna have to take it down anyway no? And when the company notices that 80% of the traffic to their site disappears when google takes them down ...
*DrugCheese rants*
Sure, and the newspapers had every right to sue. But google has the right to say, "Look, if you want to be listed on our site, you have to let us cache your pages. Don't want to let us cache? Then we aren't listing your site."
Now, they may have the right to do that, but I doubt they will. It doesn't make financial sense for them. They depend on content providers, as much if not more than the content providers depend on them.
Out of curiosity, do you think these newspapers have the right to force google to list them, on their terms, without caching text? Or do you just think the newspapers have the right not to have their content used, without having the right to force google to list them?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Everyone has their moments.
(Damn, I didn't even notice... I must be new here. Or wait.)
No, I do not think Google has an obligation to list them.
/. knee-jerk reaction, much like the "then MS should pull out of europe" stupidity.
I simply pointed out that "then we delist you. There!" was a mighty childish thing to do. Typical
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
They have the right to do it, but it would be incredibly childish, not to mention financially stupid and a PR disaster. I think we're in agreement.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."