Belgian Newspapers Delisted On Google

D H NG writes "After being ordered by the Belgian courts to 'remove from its Google.be and Google.com sites, and in particular, cached links visible on Google Web and the Google News service, all articles, photographs and graphics of daily newspapers published in French and German by Belgian publishers,' Google had removed all traces of the newspapers in question from all its search services. The newspapers, however, are crying foul, and alleged that it was done in retaliation for being sued for copyright violations."

Comments

Of course it was done in retaliation.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you gonna do about it?

(Google does support a noarchive robots extension tag, so instead of suing Google, you could have had just the search results without content by simply adjusting your server output.)

Uh, tough?

[_Shad0w_]

I think the correct response is "tough". Google have no obligation to include your site in their search results and if you start fucking around claiming copyright violation then the easiest way for Google to deal with it is to remove any trace of your sites entirely.

Welcome to the unintended consequences of your actions. Next time think about what you're doing a little harder.

Re:Uh, tough?

[grim-one]

You're welcome to opt-out with your robots.txt

Re:Uh, tough?

[Shadow of Eternity]

I'm having a hard time calling this censorship. It's more like giving up on a tantrumming child who's WAY to picky about their food and just saying "Fine, he'll eat when he gets hungry."

Re:Uh, tough?

[cyberthanasis12]

Welcome to the unintended consequences of your actions. Next time think about what you're doing a little harder.

What unintended? That's what they asked for, that's what they got. I am all for EU, I am European myself, but for once an American company did exactly what the court ordered. And now we complain?

A case of be careful what you wish for

[Liam Pomfret]

Sounds to me like that court order pretty much required Google to do what they did. I assume the newspapers simply didn't realise exactly what it was they were really asking for when they made that attack, and I'm sure their competitors are loving them for it right now.

Money

[xkuehn]

If Google doesn't remove them from its searches, they demand money on the basis of ridiculous copyright claims.

If Google does remove them, they demand money on the basis of Google abusing its monopoly to punish them.

I know it doesn't make sense if you're sane, but that's how these sorts of people reason.

Re:Money

[RsG]

Okay, this is partly a case of a poorly written summary. From reading the second article, here's the short version.

A number of newspapers in Belgium won a suit against Google for putting their papers in Google News. The judge in the case ordered Google to remove the sites. Rather than just removing the sites from their news aggregator, they also delisted them from their search engine.

Depending on how much slack you want to give Google, this is either a case of the judge's order being over broad or Google deliberately implementing it in an over broad fashion in order to make a point. I tend toward the latter interpretation; they are not so subtly reminding the papers that they need Google more than Google needs their content.

Now the newspapers are crying foul. They do want to get listed in search results when someone goes looking for them, but don't want to be "plagiarized" (their interpretation, not mine) by Google News.

Re:Money

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the link pointing to the actual judge's order. You see:
- Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name) within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of
1,000,000.- ? per day of delay;

What don't you understand with "from all their sites". Then in the clarification between brackets it says again: "or any other name".

Re:Money

[snowgirl]

...from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name) ...

Heh. Be careful what you ask for. You might get it. Also sounds like the Judge is wearing his ass for a hat but that's so common it isn't newsworthy.

I'm not sure how this works in Belgium, but in the US, the moving party typically writes the order themselves, and the judge just signs off. So, it's entirely likely that the Belgian Newspapers screwed themselves by trying to ensure that there weren't loopholes to their order.

Re:Confused

[kjoonlee]

I don't understand the logic behind the whining of these newspapers. First they sue Google for making their content discoverable. Then the court orders Google to remove the content. Google complies. Now the papers are whining about Google removing their content. What exactly is it that they want ?

I think they want to have their cake and eat it too.

They want to appear on Google web searches, but they don't want to be aggregated on Google News.

court said : all their sites

[Weezul]

I'm happy that Google takes the high road more often than not.

In this case, Google has done exactly what the court ordered, well according to this English translation :

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000 per day of delay

If the court had issued a more detailed order, like banning Google News only but granting Google web search a fair use exemption, then I'm sure Google would've followed that order instead.

If the court had merely banned Google from displaying the pictures and text snippets, but explicitly permitted them to use the titles, then Google would likely still show the results in Google News, but ranked very lowly. Search results should obviously not be cluttered up by stupid links without summaries.

I'd guess the paper's layer obtained this strong language thinking they'd negotiate some licensing deal with google. Yet first, google must obviously implement the literal court order as written. duh! Second, any licensing deal is unlikely to benefit the papers much because the papers depend more upon google than google depends upon them. Why should google buy their text snippets when other good Belgian papers give text snippets about the same subject matter for free?

Re:I'm trying to parse this

[TapeCutter]

Robots.txt is not a solution to their problem. The problem they have is falling revenue, the solution they want is a slice of google pie.