Belgian Newspapers Delisted On Google 385
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."
Of course it was done in retaliation. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Google needs to do this more often. (Score:4, Insightful)
All these companies and sites that get all pissy with google over stupid stuff...
First thing google should do in any case of complaints or being sued is to strip ALL refrences to the offending site/company from their index.
"We feel the only contact we should have with $org$ is thru our lawyers."
As a google investor i like this idea.
court said : all their sites (Score:5, Insightful)
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:court said : all their sites (Score:5, Insightful)
Oops, there are two court orders here, one from yesterday and one from 2006.
If the current court explicitly order covers Google Index, well that's the second time the papers pulled this stunt this stupidly, which is just give the French more ammo for their Belgian jokes (hint : the French always joke about Belgians being stupid).
If the current court order only explicitly covers Google News, unlike the last court order, then Google is simply covering their ass by removing the content from Google Index too. Imho, that's the correct response until the courts have explicitly okayed some links.
In the long run, Google Index obviously generates it's news results using Google News, meaning a news site not indexed by Google News will never make the Google Index front page anyways. So the papers will never see any traffic even after the court okays Google Index.
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I'm not convinced.
Lets take two other views:
1) Google can index whatever they like. They are not *required* to index anything (though they'd be a pretty shit search engine if they didn't index anything ;).
2) Google may just be viewing it as protecting themselves from being sued again by these companies.
Even *if* it is a blatant attempt to punish $org$, it serves $org$ right for suing Google instead of taking a more measured and technical approach. By measured I mean actually discussing it with Google and as
Re:Of course it was done in retaliation. (Score:5, Informative)
More: the Google News bot has a different User-Agent, so you can block it without blocking the search engine crawler.
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=93977 [google.com]
Re:Of course it was done in retaliation. (Score:5, Funny)
Here is the business plan of these newspapers:
1) Sue Google
2) Win , but be delisted
3) Wait for Bing to pay a license fee for their content
4) Profit !
Bing will easily attract the million of viewers that Google was providing.
I'm trying to parse this (Score:5, Insightful)
Help me out:
#2 is the exact thing the court ordered in #1, right?
So why, O, why, are the publishers whining in #3:
Money (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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".
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...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.
Re:Money (Score:5, Informative)
...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:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
You are aware of the concept of malicious compliance, I hope?
The judge's order did not explicitly mention Google search, but did explicitly mention Google news and ambiguously mentioned "by any other name", which can be interpreted either way. So, there are a couple of other ways this could have gone.
Google could have asked for clarification. Judges will do that if prompted. Contrary to what some of the armchair lawyers on slashdot will tell you, intent matters in law. If intent is unclear, it's universally understood that you ask first before proceeding. Clarification would have revealed no intent to delist the papers. Or Google could have used common sense to interpret the order narrowly to mean "delist the papers from Google news". It is obvious that they would not be fined for continuing to display search results. If the decision makers really felt the need to cover their asses, a simple phone call to their lawyers would tell them to ask the judge for clarification.
Hence, I think it's obvious this is a case of malicious compliance. They deliberately choose the interpretation of an ambiguous court order that snubbed the newspapers. They will, along with some of the slashdot crowd, get around this by pretending the ambiguity wasn't there.
Now, I know that some hotheaded idiot or Google apologist is already typing a furious reply to this post, so I'm going to preempt the inevitable: I'm siding with Google on this one. Yes, I think they were being dicks, but frankly if I were in their shoes I would have done the exact same thing. There'll be an clarification of the original court order shortly relisting the papers, but the message to the papers in question - "You need us more than we need you" - was much deserved.
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You know what the craziest thing here is? Google makes money by insuring people find your site so they can visit it and you make money by people visiting your web site. How in the world these two obviously compatible aims can end up fighting each other in court is really in the realm of the bizarre. As for "malicious compliance"? I can't fathom a world in which a private company such as Google is forced to provide links to anybody they don't wish to.
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How exactly could anybody achieve a monopoly on the web? There's no way Google can prevent you from using any other search engine or web portal. There's no lock-in. There's no way to restrict supply here, no way to play any of the market games that are the hallmark of a monopoly.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
They will, along with some of the slashdot crowd, get around this by pretending the ambiguity wasn't there.
Umm...
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
WHAT ambiguity? Where?! Sorry, but you're just making up any "ambiguity" out of thin air. The judge's order was pretty damned comprehensive and inclusive. There's nothing Google could have excluded without running afoul of the order as it was worded. They followed it to the letter, no more and no less. There is no room for interpretation with the phrasing "from all their sites", unless you expect Google to pull a Clinton and ask the judge to define the word "all".
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, it boils down to one thing:
Lawyers are bullshit artists extraordinaire. And the law is their paintbrush. This is the same lot who can take a statement like: "shall make no law", which by all rational standards should amount to a very simple boolean, and come up with a meaning like: "should, in general, refrain from making laws unless they really feel like it".
Obviously, it's no different in Belgium.
Re:Money (Score:5, Insightful)
Or Google could have used common sense to interpret the order narrowly to mean "delist the papers from Google news". It is obvious that they would not be fined for continuing to display search results.
True, but Google faces a fine of 1 million euros each day that it does not comply (with 10 days' grace). At one million euros a day, I be taking a broad interpretation too.
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Ambiguity doesn't just mean unclear wording. Ambiguity can also refer to situations where intent doesn't match up with phrasing. I think you'd probably agree that the intent here and the way the court order was written are at odds with each other, yes?
Legal language can be utterly precise, to the point of being verbose and strange, but precision doesn't remove ambiguity if what's being written with such precision is different from what the writer wanted to convey. That's plain human error.
And since you c
Is there any wonder? (Score:3)
And no
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Who cares if both companies have money to burn over a copyright pissing contest. If the befuddling legal language was written by professionals, agreed upon by a professional "arbitrator, the judge", and executed by professionals, the result was absolutely correct. Both laymen and professionals now generally agree the newspaper got exactly what they asked for and the judge agreed to. If that is NOT what they wanted, then bogus clarification requests are only a hi
Re:Money (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as Google seems like practically a public utility, it is a publicly-traded corporation allowed to protect its own interests and has a fiduciary responsibility to act in what its directors feel is the best interest fo its shareholders.
That means if Larry and Sergei feel that shareholder interests are best protected by de-listing any site that marginally fucks with Google in ANY WAY WHATSOEVER, (i.e., frivolous lawsuits in indulgent Belgian court systems), guess what? Goodbye Belgian papers.
TL;DR: Don't fuck with Google. You won't like their 'remedy.'
"Don't be evil" is a mission statement with a broad interpretation.
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When it comes to the search engine, it may be very difficult to code it to comply with the court order and also allow for the mention of said paper. The whole cache system for example may not be coded to "exclude from cache these specific pages", so it is either to filter out ALL those Belgian papers completely, or end up not in compliance with the court order.
Search tends to be an "inclusive" thing where you have to be very selective to exclude content....how do you exclude the content of papers while l
Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
Any papers could exclude exactly the content they want excluded from exactly the google sites they want it excluded because Google's news indexer has a separate user agent [google.com].
If they get an injunction however, then Google must obviously read the injunction as broadly as possible to avoid fines.
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If that was just retaliation they could've done it at the start of the lawsuit. Instead they did it once the courts told them to remove stuff. Maybe they did more than asked but it's believable that they would just erase as much as possible to make sure they aren't accidentally violating any part of the court order. I mean, who's to say they wouldn't flip over the small excerpts shown in the regular search results or something?
Yeah, exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
Copiepresse's lawyers won a strongly worded injunction on behalf of these three papers. Google is making sure they don't violate it.
Ironically, the papers already had the ability to control how their content was displayed on google, through the nosnippets and nocache flags in metatags, google news' separate user agent id, etc. All they've achieved is : Now the papers must pay Copiepresse lawyers to make those changes slowly rather than paying their own technical people to make them quickly.
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They aren't selling anything to the Belgian press, unless the Belgian press decides to buy into AdWords or something. Since the Belgian press seem to prefer to opt out of Google's services, I don't see how they can complain when Google decides to comply (perhaps) overly broadly with the court order.
Besides, there's always Bing.
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Certainly Google knows what the effects of being de-listed would be and as such they would have to know that this was not what the newspapers were asking for. It seems like an obvious case of malicious compliance to me but I guess we will see what the presiding judge says.
Possibly, perhaps even quite likely, Google doesn't have an in-between setting. They have to process an enormous amount of data very quickly in order to stay current. It is quite possible that Google listings are either All or Nothing. You're either listed the way that we automatically and without bias list you, or you're not listed at all. You don't get some special little menu of yes to this and no to that because we simply cannot afford to give such unique offers out to everyone who wants something diffe
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the country were spelling is more important than social security,
Really? Not trying to be a spelling nazi, but I just find that humourous. :)
Everything beyond the hill is strange, dangerous and full of weird folk
I think they're right on this one. Of course, what they don't mention is that everything this side of the hill is strange, dangerous, and full of weird folk...
Beer (Score:3)
You get better beer than the rest of Europe though! :)
Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:4, Informative)
they didn't want to get automatically syndicated to google's news portals. so they asked to be removed from that auto syndication, which probably was giving them headaches as they didn't have copyrights to allow for such. so now what google did was to remove them totally from google services. it's just one example why you should keep a search service separate from auto generated portals. or just reform copyright and get out of the mess.
but i'd imagine for example if they license a story from reuters or whatever, they're only licensing it for their own use and not for re-licensing - which would be needed to auto syndicate it to google news site.
this is only sort of fair, you see, building a service like google news isn't hard at all - what's hard is letting the content providers let you do it.
Google *IS* the internet (Score:2)
Whether this act
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Without Google websites have nothing.
And that statement in itself shows the severity of the current situation on the Internet. And how much power is in the hands of a foreign, private, and fully unaccountable organisation.
Re:Google *IS* the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, you're fond of that phrase. It's at least the second post you've used it verbatim in. Let's have a look at it.
"Foreign": Not to me, they're not. And everybody's foreign to somebody.
"Private": Which means they don't have the right to extract money and obedience by force. Oooh, evil.
"Unaccountable": On the contrary, they're very accountable--to the people who do searches. If they compromise their ability to serve up accurate, comprehensive and useful searches, people will go elsewhere. They're not accountable at all to the sites being searched, and a damn good thing, too.
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There is nothing stopping you from creating a search engine of your own and implementing policies which would be more to your liking. I've had webpage crawling assignments as a undergraduate CS assignment. It isn't all that complicated.
The trick is to get something which can handle the billions of hits per day like Google and to be able to set up the logic so you don't have people gaming whatever system you are doing. They've built a better mousetrap and lots of people are using it. I used many other we
Re:Google *IS* the internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Also Google News could only steal their readers if the newspapers actually had stories that couldn't be found on other publications. If they're just copy-pasting AP/AFP/whatever articles they're getting crushed on the internet either way.
Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:5, Informative)
but i'd imagine for example if they license a story from reuters or whatever, they're only licensing it for their own use and not for re-licensing - which would be needed to auto syndicate it to google news site.
Google never has "auto-syndicated" anything from the news websites it aggregates on google news. At most it thumbnails images, pulls headlines and lead sentences. Every full-content article you find hosted on news.google.com itself was licensed from the newswires by google themselves.
Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:5, Informative)
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they didn't want to get automatically syndicated to google's news portals. so they asked to be removed from that auto syndication, which probably was giving them headaches as they didn't have copyrights to allow for such. so now what google did was to remove them totally from google services. it's just one example why you should keep a search service separate from auto generated portals. or just reform copyright and get out of the mess.
Could they not have solved this problem with robots.txt? I'm guessing there must be a technical reason why not, but if re-licensing of the content was a problem maybe the smarter thing to do would have been to tap google on the shoulder and say "we have a problem with you 'republishing' some of the content on our site because we don't have a license for us to allow you to do that. Can we work out a robots.txt-like solution?". I assume it was the lawyers idea just to take it to court...
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Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:5, Insightful)
So why didn't they just have their web servers issue a 403 Forbidden when the Google news bot shows up? It's not like it's hard to detect, since it calls itself the Google news bot.
Hey look at that, problem solved without lawyers and asshattery. I guess that made far too much sense for the MBAs.
Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apparently they are retarded and didn't realize that removing themselves from Googles cache entirely involved removing themselves from search period.
The caching service is directly tied into the search service. If they had instead just gone after Google News they would have been fine. Their over-reaching law suit, probably in an attempt to garner more damages, has put them into their current predicament. They have no one to blame but themselves.
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An article Friday on the web site of one of the newspapers, La Libre, took issue with Google's interpretation.
"It is necessary to distinguish the Google search engine from the Google news service," the article said. "The news editors do not oppose having their content referenced by the Google search engine, they refuse on the other hand for their informational content to be included in Google News," the article said.
It seems as if the newspapers wish to impose their own, limited understanding of a service they use on the way a company does business. Based on that statement, it's difficult to determine exactly what the arrogance -to- ignorance ratio behind this litigation has been.
Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:4, Informative)
The english document that is available seem to support Google.
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
It sounds very weird, probably machine-translated, but 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 sounds pretty straight-forward.
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Couldn't agree more. The problem with people owning copyright is that they seem to have this craving for controlling that copyright in every aspect, even the aspects where it doesn't really matter. Believe me, it matters NOT where your content is archived if you already publish it to the world as long the proper source citing is done, which is always the case with Google. You only get more visitors in the end, which is entirely what you want. If you are too stupid to grasp this, you should get a lesson, and
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This is true, however not so in Belgium as far as I know. But even so, you have to balance the costs of your enforcement against the costs of loosing exposure at all. Clearly they underestimated that cost and now they are paying the rather steep price. I won't shed a single tear for them, and it will make other think before they act!
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Which jurisdictions make copyright more difficult to enforce if done later rather than sooner? I know that trademarks can risk being considered generic if not defended, but I haven't seen a similar situation for copyright.
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You're right: No where in what you quoted does it say to withdraw a link to them from Google's search engine.
In that case it doesn't require them to withdraw a link to them from news.google.com either. It's the same search engine filtered to news articles. And the order says all sites.
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Err.... There is a million euro fine per day that Google would be fined if they kept something that they should not have done. If I was ordered to either pay that or remove it from ALL sites - they be gone in no time. Imagine standing up to the board to explain you lost another 5 million euros because the interpretation from the Judge was to include the links too and it took them five days for you before you could remove them.
Remember, these are pissed of news papers - They could have solved these with ro
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Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:4, Insightful)
They can have the link, but without any content to match the searches, they'd never show up.
Google followed the court order, nothing more.
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It says "the articles, photographs and graphic representations", not links. Links it seems would still be permitted.
Google has just lost a court case about "articles, photographs etc.". It is very understandable that they would now want to be on the cautious side, and avoid being sued again. So in Google's place, I wouldn't show any links without explicit permission. And I would still be very cautious about misunderstandings, so I don't think I would show _anything_ unless I had permission from these newspapers to show _everything_ without restrictions.
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Maybe the link is still there. Of course, without content to match the search query, it'll never show up.
Google is a search engine, not a directory. You need content for links to show up.
Re:I'm trying to parse this (Score:4, Insightful)
- 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;
Emphasis mine. If Google isn't allowed to have any content from the newspapers on any of Google's sites and search engine indexing is based on content, then how is it supposed to index the pages?
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From the summary:
"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"
Notice "google.be" and "google.com" websites. No mention of "news.google.be". And also "visible on Google Web and the Google News service". Not just news, web search and news search.
Google did exactly what they were told to do. It's the judge who gave
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" all articles, photographs and graphics of daily newspapers"
dont think that really leaves much to link to........
You can link to the official website, you just can re host it.
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the court order says to remove the data from "all their sites... any form of cache". Google would have been in violation of the court order if they DID NOT REMOVE the sites from the index. See bottom of page 2 of the court order: http://images.chillingeffects.org/notices/5133.pdf [chillingeffects.org]
since the index fits both those conditions, all Google could do was to dump the sites entirely. Remember that even presenting a link to the site is a form of cache in itself since it caches the title and the name of the paper.
short
Uh, tough? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
No shit (Score:2)
You don't get to tell a search provider how they are supposed to use the content they index from you. I am ok with the idea that you should be able to tell them not to index you, if you don't want that done, but if you choose to be indexed you don't get to say "You can only do it in the way we specify, or using the terms we specify."
They demanded Google remove their shit, Google complied completely.
Also, when it comes to legal threats as were involved here, what choice does Google really have? The letter of
Re:Uh, tough? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Uh, tough? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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OTOH, if Google is doing what a government is forcing them to do, the word "censorship" surely applies... ;-) Get angry, but get angry at the right people.
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They had a *court order* not to include links to those URL's. What do you expect?
It looks like Google even spent several months trying to fight it, before finally giving in.
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I don't like the idea of my search results being censored.
Then you should make sure that the copyright laws in your jurisdiction are sane. Google didn't do this voluntarily, they were ordered by a court 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
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You aren't missing much, it's only affecting Belgium.
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2) Google News does not include entire articles, usually only enough to entice you to visit the actual site of the paper in question, thus driving up traffic free of charge. Don't even get me started with your "Thou shalt not steal" drivel. I award you no points, and highly recommend that you report to the nearest sterility clinic, your genes (specifically those meant for intelligence and reason
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It's not that, it's that they want to pick and choose exactly what parts of google they show up in and how. They don't want to be in google news but they want to be in regular google. That sort of thing is such a pain in the ass that, like a parent dealing with an overly picky child at the dinner table, they said "Fine, you'll eat when you're hungry" and took them off completely.
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But the thing is: they can!. Google's News bot has a different user-agent than Google's Search bot, so they can block the former in robots.txt without blocking the latter.
They went the legal way probably trying to get paid for "infringement" and got more than they asked for. Well, too bad.
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How would you provide a search result for them without breaking their copyright?
Re:Uh, tough? (Score:5, Insightful)
No the problem and I can understand Google's perspective is that they were sued for doing linking. Google said fine you sued us, but now we have to remove you because we might get in trouble again.
You may say its retaliation. I say its because of the software. Think about it. Google has this huge search engine that goes through the Internet. I am betting the news.google.com is a service that sits ontop of the search engine. So now Google has to remove the websites in question. They can do it one of two ways:
1) Create a "don't use this content link" in news.google.com, which means changing their software.
2) Add the websites in question to do not crawl thus removing them from everything.
Remember that Google has a ton of services that work off the Google search engine. Does Google want to wait and get sued again because now instead of news.google.com its some other service that is doing the offending? I would just say it, bugger it remove them from the search engine. And of course a side benefit is that they get to release some steam.
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the ruling seems to say that google.be and google.com sites or any other google site has to remove content. i think that does include search.
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It
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A govt run search engine??
A case of be careful what you wish for (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
Or maybe they just realise that by jumping up and down and screaming they can get more news coverage and hopefully get more people to hear about them. Is this big news in Belgian? Are people buying the papers to see what all the fuss is about?
They got what they asked for, not what they wanted (Score:5, Interesting)
Google doesn't want to have to deal with another lawsuit over whether this link or that link is illegal. Nor are they going to spend extra money trying to be nice to somebody who used a blunderbuss lawsuit against them.
All of the links that they want removed are removed. Job done. The rest is just Google being very, very thorough.
It's kinda like a kid pissing on a wasps nest and complaining that the wasps didn't just quietly wait to drown. He'll be holding his breath a long time waiting for me to feel sorry for him -- or stop laughing, for that matter.
Of course it was done in retaliation! (Score:5, Funny)
So they thought that "pay us for using our content" meant "now you have to use our content and then pay us". Oops, maybe not!
It does sound like a particularly (French-)Belgian idea, though. Next we'll hear they are parking tractors on the Information Superhighway in protest...
Only French and German? (Score:2)
By far the most common of the three languages in Belgium is Dutch.
The German-speaking community in Belgium is tiny by comparison.
Re: (Score:2)
Possibly the Dutch speaking half is the smart half?
Oh, wait a moment... that would imply there are smart Belgians... then how about all those Belgian jokes we always tell in The Netherlands?
Re: (Score:2)
One Belgian joke indeed goes like "how many Belgian jokes are there?" "None - they are all true".
Oh and for people not from our part of the world: they're basically the same as the jokes about blondes. Just replace "blond" by "Belgian".
Re: (Score:2)
The part of Denmark where German is a recognised language was annexed by the Germans in 1866 after a war with Denmark and they actively settled Germans in this territory.
After the first world war the present Danish-German border was established from the outcome of a plebiscite, the German and Danish minorities on both sides of the new border were given certain rights like
Re: (Score:3)
By far the most common of the three languages in Belgium is Dutch.
The German-speaking community in Belgium is tiny by comparison.
And with good reason, too, after having been run over by German armies twice in 30 years despite having declared neutrality beforehand and then having suffered the privations of 2 military occupations. It's about the same in Belgium as in Denmark: a really good way to get yourself ignored is to try to start a conversation in German.
Do you actually live anywhere near the Belgian-German border? My sister lives on the Maas, so she could spit on Belgium from her front door. (Ok, not quite, but close.) She also lives about 2km from the German border. She took me to a horse accessories place, and a person came in to get her riding shoes repaired, and spoke German to the attendant. My sister spoke Dutch to the attendant.
"Ok, but that's Flemland." My mother had a medical incident in Brussels, and we had an unscheduled two week extra stay. I s
Re: (Score:2)
A total of 23 million native speakers makes it the 6th. language in Europe, The combined GDP of The Netherlands and Flemish Belgium lands them around the 15-16th. spot in the world.
Newsflash: Belgium even more irrelevant (Score:2)
One would think that a country already so thoroughly invisible on the international stage would do whatever possible to promote visibility. Nice work, Belgian media. You've actually managed to erase yourselves from search.
Re: (Score:2)
Playing it safe (Score:2)
One could argue that Google went beyond the court order to a punitive extreme. But remember how Google works: it associates phrases and sentences with websites, and returns snippets of text along with the search results. I'd argue that their search engine *can't work* without storing at least fragmentary pieces of the newspapers' content, and they have no way of knowing whether a court will consider those fragments large enough to be a copyright violation. So nuking the sites from orbit is the only way t
I know this is Slashdot, but read the article (Score:3, Informative)
Google said an order issued in the case required it to exclude the newspapers' websites.
This does appear to be the case. Remove content from "all your sites" is very broad, and with the penalties mentioned I'd remove them, too. Seems an entirely reasonable response to that court order, especially accompanied by the relist offer.
The paper La Capitale said on its web site Friday that Google had begun "boycotting" it.
Google spokesman William Echikson said the court decision applied to web search as well as Google News and the company faced fines of 25,000 euros ($35,359 per infringement if it allowed the newspapers' websites to keep appearing.
"We regret having to do so," he said. "We would be happy to re-include Copiepresse if they would indicate their desire to appear in Google Search and waive the potential penalties."
See that last line? Google has explicitly said, give us permission to list you in search again and we will, no questions asked. So all the people jumping up and down about Google abusing their monopolistic power... no. They aren't.
I really don't see how this is anything but a cash grab by the newspapers that misfired. After Google's offer to relist them as soon as they have permission, it's going to be quite awkward to A) deny Google that permission and then B) sue Google for delisting you. But I'm certain the newspapers will try. The delist and offer to relist seems to be a simple attempt to cut through legal shenanigans on Google's part. "We can list you or not list you. Say which one you want and we'll do it." And then afterwards, they can't cry about being unhappy with their status anymore with any real credibility.
Google's response (Score:4, Informative)
Google responded to a query from a dutch newsite regarding this issue.
Source: http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/107318/google-verbant-belgische-kranten--uitgevers-woest.html [webwereld.nl]
Relevant quote, translated:
``We regret having taken this action, and are open for future cooperation with members of Copiepresse. Would we keep the material in our index, we risk fines up to 25,000 euro per incident. We would be pleased to include Copiepresse in our index if they declare they want to be included on Google Search and refrain from potentional charges``, Google declares to Webwereld.
Original response in dutch:
``"Het spijt ons dat we dit moeten doen, en we staan open voor samenwerking met leden van Copiepresse in de toekomst. Zouden we het materiaal in de index houden, dan riskeren we boetes tot 25.000 euro per inbreuk. We nemen Copiepresse graag weer op in de index als ze aangeven op Google Search te willen verschijnen en afzien van potentiële boetes", verklaart Google tegenover Webwereld.``
Ancient wisdom ignored at your own peril (Score:3)
Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it!.
Re:Confused (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Which does raise some interesting questions about how Google works on the backend. I wonder if it's actually possible for a news site to appear on one and not the other with how Google's search database is setup.
Yes it is perfectly possible, via the application of robots.txt. THis is purely a story about publishers deciding they want to fleece Google for some cash rather than just apply the relevant settings to their robots.txt files. Guess it kind of backfired on them. Karma or something.
Re: (Score:3)
It actually looks a little more to me like they wanted to control which documents google indexed legally instead of technically and google said "we already have given you a technical mechanism to utilize and if you won't then you're too much trouble and we will route around you like the damage you are". Your summary sentence is still accurate, though.