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:
it's only a minority of the Belgian press who went to court
the others (Flemish part) all have nice deals with Google
Google has a lot of legal ways to counter this ruling, this is not the end..
the expert who assisted the judge was a former MICROSOFT employee
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.
First of all : it is pretty complex to explain our Belgian laws to you.. but I'll try!
If you read the complete text there are several important points :
- first of all Google wasn't in the courtroom to defend themselves,
this leaves a whole procedure open for them to react. (but do they care?)
- your robot.txt makes no sense here, that's an opt-out. In Belgium everything has to
be opt-in.
- all newspapers are strong entities in Belgium, nobody searches them in Google, everyone just
types the newspaper name, followed by.be
- the main argument was brought to the judge by a court expert. They
did some tests by removing articles on some newspaper websites (for example : wrong info,
re-edited articles) but Google News would still show them.
This is a major issue here. You have to know we have a special database law (1992)
in Belgium. This law prohibits the commercial use, non-commercial transaction of databases
between entities and.. the creation of a database (whatever data) without the explicit knowledge
of those who are "databased"..
For the judge it was clear that Google made a "database" of the articles - so case closed.
(although i think "google cache" is not the same as "a database")
As a Belgian I'm proud we have the strongest privacy laws in the world (really, study them..),
but the database law is now used in a copyright infringement suit.
(where in the past, it was mainly used to protect individuals)
Besides of all these things : we still are slammed with arguments like "google making money with the news".
But everyone can see there are no ads on news.google.be
For your info : the flemish part of the belgian newspapers just asked
Google not to be indexed, and Google had no problem with that.
In my opinion and after reading the verdict several times,
Google would win the case with just a 0 sec. cache
Slashdot Mirror
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.
First of all : it is pretty complex to explain our Belgian laws to you.. but I'll try! If you read the complete text there are several important points : - first of all Google wasn't in the courtroom to defend themselves, this leaves a whole procedure open for them to react. (but do they care?) - your robot.txt makes no sense here, that's an opt-out. In Belgium everything has to be opt-in. - all newspapers are strong entities in Belgium, nobody searches them in Google, everyone just types the newspaper name, followed by .be
- the main argument was brought to the judge by a court expert. They
did some tests by removing articles on some newspaper websites (for example : wrong info,
re-edited articles) but Google News would still show them.
This is a major issue here. You have to know we have a special database law (1992)
in Belgium. This law prohibits the commercial use, non-commercial transaction of databases
between entities and.. the creation of a database (whatever data) without the explicit knowledge
of those who are "databased"..
For the judge it was clear that Google made a "database" of the articles - so case closed.
(although i think "google cache" is not the same as "a database")
As a Belgian I'm proud we have the strongest privacy laws in the world (really, study them..),
but the database law is now used in a copyright infringement suit.
(where in the past, it was mainly used to protect individuals)
Besides of all these things : we still are slammed with arguments like "google making money with the news".
But everyone can see there are no ads on news.google.be
For your info : the flemish part of the belgian newspapers just asked
Google not to be indexed, and Google had no problem with that.
In my opinion and after reading the verdict several times,
Google would win the case with just a 0 sec. cache