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."

Re:What's good for the goose...

[Daemonstar]

I know that my mom and wife both use Google as their "address bar". My wife wanted to go somewhere the other day (she had to use my Linux box; I playing around with Vista on the Windows one), and I told her to just type the address in the address bar (it was like JcPenney's or something). She said, "I don't want to type it in the address bar, I just want to type it in Google." Google is the default page on my Win PC. My mom does the same thing; she never uses the address bar. She usually asks, "How do I do that?" when I tell her to just type it in.

Back when I was employed at an ISP, we had a Google search box on our main page. Whenever our main page was down for updates or screwups, we *always* got calls from users asking when the page would be back up so they could surf the web. They would use the Google search box to get around the Internet instead of using the address bar or using a different search engine.

It's not far fetched that they will lose traffic if Google doesn't index them in their search results.

Lazy belgian webmasters (use robots.txt)

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just use robots.txt?

Could it be that they actually WANT to be available to search engines? Can't have it both ways.

[from google's blog]

If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content. These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines.

In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index--all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.

Re:Fair Use?

[planetmn]

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

Re:What's good for the goose...

[malsdavis]

When I said about a commercial disadvantage I meant towards other search engines, portals and start pages; not News Aggregation websites.

For example if typing 'CNN' (and all the others) into Windows Live Search brings up the CNN website but Google brings up nothing (because google have de-listed CNN after refusing to let google aggregate their news) then Google certainly will have a commercial disadvantage to Windows Live Search and others. After a while people will stop using Google as their start page or even as a Search Engine if prominent media websites (which as previously stated have amongst the highest unique hit rates) are absent from Google.

Re:Saw This Yesterday

[acroyear]

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.