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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?
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?
The submitter tried to search for the story using google but couldn't find it.
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 ----
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
that one was about google cache infringing on copyright. this one is about google news infringing on copyright.
so yes, multiple court cases.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
.. to title this story "Brussels Sprouts Stink"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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?
No, they're the same case. The original article:M .20070213.w2belggoogle0213/BNStory/Business/home
l e.html?_r=2&ref=business&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGA
This article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/business/14goog
Notice they both talk about Google News and a group of French newspapers.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
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.
Automatic machine processes don't obey copyright law. Is your browser violating copyright law? Is each of the servers passing all the information between you and the content provider, copying the information without permission? Could Belgium sue AT&T? It seems pretty clear AT&T is distributing their information without permission for profit.
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
most of the news places that google links to are just repeaters for reuters and ap stories anyway
So then why doesn't google subscribe to these same services for the content, rather than piggyback on somebody elses subscription? They certainly have the money to do it.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
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.
google should have no qualms about just dropping those sites from ALL of its search engines (make them feel the crunch THAT way) to deal with it.
This is now a marketting leverage that Google I think should use until such time as someone calls them a monopoly on it and pulls anti-trust action on them.
From a customer standpoint, we use their site under their terms of service.
So too should an indexed site. Want to be indexed by Google so the world can find you? Agree to their terms of letting them cache your material. Some negotiations might be made for the size of the cache and the duration of it should your site be pulling stuff from the "free" zone, but generally, if you want to be found, you have to agree to be stored.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
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
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/