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Google Relents, Publishes Belgian Ruling
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Sep 23, 2006 04:28 PM
from the who-is-afraid-of-belgium dept.
from the who-is-afraid-of-belgium dept.
gambit3 writes "Google on Saturday published on its Belgian website a court order which forbids the Internet search engine to reproduce snippets of Belgian press on its news amalgamation service. The move constituted a u-turn as Google had said on Friday that it would not comply with the court order despite facing a fine of 500,000 euros ($640,900) daily if it did not publish the ruling." From the article: "Google said its service is lawful and drives traffic to newspaper sites because people need to click through to the original publisher to read the full story. It now displays stories from news agencies, foreign newspapers and Internet sites belonging to local television stations."
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Your Rights Online: Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper 381 comments
CaVi writes "Following a judicial action (link in French) by the 'French-speaking Belgian Association of the press,' Google.be has removed all the French-speaking press sites from its index, as can be seen by doing a search. The court order to Google is posted at Chilling Effects.
In summary, the editors want a cut of the profit that Google News makes using their information. No such deal exists for the moment. Google has been ordered to remove all references, or pay one million Euros per day if it doesn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google's search. Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN? Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?" There's also a link to a Dutch news article on the subject; one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself, so rather then linking to the newspaper, Google was displaying it on their own.
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Yes, but... (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Copyright is copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Copyright is copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair use is a longstanding element of copyright that "content owners" (sic) were hoping we would all just eventually forget about. Google's indexing of information (even if it involves copying without permission) is a perfect example of fair use, and hopefully this case will be high-profile enough to get people asking questions about this stuff
Parent
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As for them changing the content, where are they doing that? Truncating it, sure, but no real modifications.
Re:Copyright is copyright (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
killing fair use/public domain through FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
If they did, then it should be challenged, but that's not what they're doing.
may potentially lead to Google winning the case and setting a precedent whereby all information publicly available on the internet would be entered into the public domain or at least break ground for fair use.
If you want to put content on the Internet and not have it be indexed, archived, and/or republished, you have two simple options: use a robots.txt file or require a loging.
What is really going on is that companies like the Belgian newspapers want to destroy the public domain and fair use: if companies like Google can't assume that content that is freely available on the Internet is actually either public domain or available under fair use, then public domain and fair use are dead.
In different words, companies like the Belgian newspaper are trying to kill the public domain and fair use through FUD. And the Belgian court has handed them a victory. It's disgusting.
Parent
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I have serious doubts with these procedings, and question the views of the court's expert on this case. I'm not surprized at all this is happening in Belgium, only worried for what has become possible in this small European country...
I agree with Google's response removing all links to the French & German press in Belgium. Google should tread careful now, because the same court may force them to
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"Fair Use" in the American context usually means very limited quotation. Reviews. Citations.
It may apply to slightly extended usage rights within the home.
It does not mean that a commercial entity like Google can sweep up everything in sight for fr
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Yargghh! And screw grammar and spelling! It's just keepin' the man down.
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And the Belgian newspapers will see a drop (Score:5, Interesting)
Good for them.
Will they sue Yahoo/MSN next?
Re:And the Belgian newspapers will see a drop (Score:5, Interesting)
If you do the right search in Google, you'll turn up the following message: and the following link [chillingeffects.org] and comparison [chillingeffects.org]
Parent
I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
According to the ruling I'm reading right now on google.be, I can sum up your misunderstanding in two words: Google cache.
Parent
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Hard to say, the last part of the ruling mention's the court dismay that Google refused to take part in the technical assesment portion of the trial, which is where such details would have been timely and constructive to divulge.
I think google shot itself in the foot there.
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
According to the ruling I'm reading right now on google.be, I can sum up your misunderstanding in two words: Google cache.
I can respond in one filename: robots.txt.
Parent
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What do you want to be the standard, or should there be two standards? One for things you can use and one for things you can't?
What if all I harvest are email-adresses, instead of copyrighted newsarticles?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
On top of removing and permanently banning them from the Google index.
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Actually, an earlier article explained it is exactly like that, for certain older stories no longer on the original publishers' sites.
(This does not make the thing less stupid, though)
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You mean like airports charging taxi drivers both for a license to pick up in the airport and each time they pick up as is the situation in Dublin?
Bussinesses charge based on what they think will get them the most money. The Belgian newspapers are no different. They understand the situation pretty well. It's just that there's money to be made.
For the amount of traffic google news generates they could pressure media to pay them
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I guess they'd just rather flex some highly paid lawyer muscle and deal with the expenses of a court battle than get some web monkey sat in a broom cupboard somewhere to take 10 minutes out of their busy schedule and do this...
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If Google stores the articles, everybody can read the old articles without paying for a subscription.
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Minitruth (Score:2, Interesting)
The court order is meaningless (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The court order is meaningless (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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Incompetence at work (Score:2, Interesting)
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As a web user, I prefer it like that, but I can understand the point of view that permission should be actually granted, not just assumed (i.e. have a Robots *Inclusion* Protocol instead).
The realization will set in... (Score:2)
Eventually news corporations will realize that they need Google a hell of a lot more than Google needs them.
(It's kind of scary that Google has become so p
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I know it is heresy to say this on Slashdot, but there are other search engines than Google.
Belgians will move to the one that serves them best. Unlike the Geek, they aren't bound to make the the pilgrimage to Mountain View.
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The loss of their ability to be the only news source is why they are suing Google in the first place. If they didn't fear Google's strength in the market of luring subscriber's away, they wouldn't be suing, would they?
Missing the Point (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue was whether the judge could require Google to publish his opinion on the front page of Google.
Question 1) If the NY Times lost a case, could a judge order them to use the whole front page to publish her opinion?
Question 2) if you lost a case, could a judge order you to buy the front page of the LA Times to publish his opinion?
Perhaps this is some Belgian thing, where a judge can require losing defendants to publish the judge's opinion on the front page of a national paper.
To our Belgian friends: is this a common practice?
Al
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One word... (Score:3, Interesting)
As an act of protest... (Score:4, Funny)
....eh, fuck this. *cracks another one open*
Do No Evil? (Score:3, Insightful)
People disagree on what "evil" means.
Obviously Google thinks it's doing the right thing by spreading information to the masses, like the information on this newspaper's website.
The newspaper, on the other hand, thinks that action is quite evil. They are losing ad revenue because of it.
Re:I'd take my ball and go home. (Score:4, Insightful)
Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it, they couldn't make 1/10 of that from Belgian operations. Shutting down google.be would be fairly harsh to the Belgian citizens who probably couldn't care less about the ruling, but hey, they'd care after that.
Actually, let's do some calculations for fun...
Google had gross revenue of $6B last year. That's $1 per person on the planet per YEAR (obviously not everyone on the planet uses Google but this will work for a rough estimate). Say Belgium would then be responsible for $10M a year. That's under $30k a day. Assume Belgians are avid Google users and round it up to $50k per day, and hey, my 1/10 estimate above wasn't too bad...
Parent
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This is a fine IF google does NOT follow the court judgement. A fine must be high enough so that Google cannot disregard the court decision.
Now they can shutdown Google.be, sure, but what will be the WORLD public opinion if they decide to shutdown Belgium because they don't like the court order (that affect only the content of the news aggregator) while at the same time they filter everything for the chines
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Belgium has a very stringent opt-in law, the kind that privacy advocates in the US dream about. Everything must be opt-in, no exceptions.
robots.txt is the internet standard, yes. It is also opt-out, because you are assumed to give consent unles
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They could have easily just complied with the court order but instead they had to make a point by petulently removing all links to the relevant newspapers and even making it hard for people to read the judgement. This is manipulating search data for political purposes to suit their own agenda. It raises doubts in my mind about how much
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Bullcrap.
Google is the one being bullied here. The government has police and guns and plenty of power. They can take your shit. They can put you in jail.
Google is doing the only thing they can do to protest: they're refusing to pr