Google Loses Cache-Copyright Lawsuit in Belgium

acroyear writes "A court in Belgium has found that Google's website caching policies are a violation of that nation's copyright laws. The finding is that Google's cache offers effectively free access to articles that, while free initially, are archived and charged for via subscriptions. Google claims that they only store short extracts, but the court determined that's still a violation. From the court's ruling: 'It would be up to copyright owners to get in touch with Google by e-mail to complain if the site was posting content that belonged to them. Google would then have 24 hours to withdraw the content or face a daily fine of 1,000 euros ($1,295 U.S.).'"

So no "fair dealing" or "fair use" in Belgium?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the whole EU had some sort of "fair dealing" exemptions. If they do, I can't believe that Google's lawyers lost this.

That's unfortunate

[aussie_a]

That is unfortunate, but I'm amazed caching is even legal in some (most?) countries. Its always seemed like it was just rampant copyright infringement to me, except of course the law in certain countries makes an exception for it.

Re:What's the problem?

[petabyte]

Or, even better, use the META tag to set NOARCHIVE:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOARCHIVE" />

All of my website (quaggaspace.org) shows up in google, but you'll notice there is no "cached" button.

Content providers may shoot themselves...

[jvkjvk]

...in the foot.

I don't believe that Google currently is mandated to show users any particular results. The simplest technological solution for Google might be to drop indexing the sites that send these takedown notices entirely. No index, no cache; dump it all and don't look back.

They are in no way legally bound to do come up with a more advanced solution that would be more $$ and add more complexity to the codebase.

Now because there very well may be information that is unavailable anywhere else (although it seems relatively unlikely - yes, they might have copyrighted articles that are unavailable otherwise, but I cannot imagine the information contained therein is such, unless you're talking about creative works) Google may try to work something out. Oh, that and they are remarkably not evil compared to the power they currently wield.

Imagine how many takedown notices they would receive after the first few rounds of companies that complained cannot be found through Google...

Abstracts are illegal?

[mshurpik]

>Google claims that they only store short extracts, but the court determined that's still a violation.

Abstracts are generally a) uninformative and b) free. Seems like a huge overreaction on the EU's part.

Good, I don't want to find that!

[Heddahenrik]

I'm often getting irritated about that I find stuff with Google and then aren't able to read it. Who wants to find a short text describing what you're searching for, only to find out that I have to pay or go through some procedure to actually read the stuff?

I hope Google removes these sites totally. Then, as written by others too, we need a law that says that the ones putting stuff on the web has to write correct HTML and robot.txt files if they don't want their content cached. Google can't manually go through every site on the web and it would be even more impossible for Google's smaller competitors.

Sounds Good To Me

[Imaria]

If Google is not allowed to have any cache of these sites, then wouldn't that mean they would have nothing to index for their searches? If you send Google that email, and suddenly don't show up on any of their searches, congrats. On the plus side, no-one has access to your content anymore. On the downside, NO-ONE has any access to your content anymore, because no-one can find you.

Here is the problem

[roman_mir]

Why should we have to opt out from being cached, why can't we opt in instead? I think the phone calls made by marketers are a perfect example of this. If you need your page to be found on Google or other search engines, add a meta tag, which explicitely lets a search engine to collect this page for indexing/caching. In fact allow these differences to be explicit, let search engines either index or cache or both.

Simple really

[RationalRoot]

If someone does not want their extracts caches, remove them ENTIRELY from google.

I don't believe that anyone has added "being indexed" to human rights yet.

D

waiting for google to *switch off* a country..

[spasm]

I keep waiting for Google to respond to one of these idiotic 'copyright' cases by simply removing service to IP address space associated with the country as an object lesson.

I can't imagine the Belgian public putting up for long with completely losing access to Google simply because their copyright laws were written in another century..

Here's how to fix the problem

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Here's how to fix the problem. When such a page would be linked to in the cach, instead put up the following:

This page is cached, but your government officials will not let you read it. Here are their names and addresses, and the date of the next election, and the challengers to them who have signed a document that they will reverse this ruling if elected:

Censor: Hercule Poirot
Free Speech Challenger: Agatha Christie
Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007

Censor: Phinneas d'Satay
Free Speech Challenger: Mannequin Pisse
Next election for them: 18 Aug 2007

etc.

Tailor it per local region if that can be determined from the IP.

9) Wait a few years

10) Profit!

Re:Caching is Copying

[McDutchie]

You are confused. Caching is fine. Searching is fine. Wholesale republication of cached pages without prior permission (i.e. Googles "cached version" link) is not fine.

Want proof? Try "caching" a prominent website on your own site and see how fast you get sued. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If Google can republish cached pages and mere mortals cannot, that's class justice.