Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper

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.

Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

No linking. Gotta love it. Undermind the damn net! Undermine I say!

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

Can't say I'm surprised. They have some strange legal notions in Belgium that don't match up with the rest of the civilized world. I got C&D from a Belgian company through a law firm in New York. The Belgian company claims to own the copyright to my vacation photos (with me standing in them!). The law firm (acting on behalf of the Belgians) demanded I take them off my web site or they'd sue me into oblivion.

I always warn people I know who are vacationing in Europe -- avoid Belgium. Who knows what else they will try to persecute you for there.

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

I always warn people I know who are vacationing in Europe -- avoid Belgium. Who knows what else they will try to persecute you for there.

Belgium is like Washington DC: too many bureaucrats for their own good.

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

can't say I'm surprised. They have some strange legal notions in Belgium

Yeah, one stupid company and the whole country should be avoided. Expert advice, Wayne!

This is quite a sensible decision by the belgian court, I think. Several newspapers offer the news of today for free on their websites, and let you pay for searching the archives. Google caches those pages and offers them for free with their own ads added. Plain and simple copyright violation, no arguing around it. But quite convenient of course...

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

but it seems to me that here in the USA and most other similar countries (e.g. UK), anything that's out in a public place (outdoor sculptures, buildings, etc.) can be photographed as much as you like.

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but this has definitely happened in Chicago [boingboing.net]

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

How does an American tourist fight a Belgian company telling them to remove "their" photos? Simple: take a photo of your hand showing the middle finger raised, and send it back to the Belgian company.

Belgian laws don't affect us here in the US.

Lets sue

So google is sued for displaying content no longer available? Thus making the 3rd party source "less needed". Too bad the common american worker can't get together and sue big corporations for outsourcing jobs, thus making the american worker "less needed". Lets start a class action suite.

Ah, Belgium

Someone "out there" is taking the piss, right? I once visited Belgium for three weeks and it became apparent quite quickly that there wasn't anything news-worthy going on. All they seem to have is really, really excellent beer.

Re:Ah, Belgium

I once visited Belgium for three weeks and it became apparent quite quickly that there wasn't anything news-worthy going on.

You didn't happen to spot the European Union Parliament Buildings did you? ....oh wait.

Re:Ah, Belgium

I don't know... looking on google, I don't find anything happening in Belgium.

Re:Ah, Belgium

We also have very good chocolate, waffles and child molesters.

Better than over inclusion of "News" Sites

I am more concerned with the over inclusion of "news" sites. The news feature on Google has been flooeded with blogs and other "new" media sources. I enjoy reading blogs, but they are often so scewed to the blogger's opinion that they need some additional context. I realize that mainstream media is often accused of bias as well, but at least I know who those stations are. The news feature is useless to me if I need to get past 200 blogs to find one legitimate source.

How important is French to the Belgians?

Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian

Well, I doubt all Belgian language entries in Google were removed, especially since the summary said only the French speaking press in Belgium was removed. The question next is how big is the French speaking press in Belgium? I'm not an expert on Belgium, so I can't really say, but if it would like removing the English-speaking press in America, it may actually be a good thing :)

By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average /.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

There's no such thing as a language called 'Belgian.'

They speak Dutch (Flemish), French, and German.

I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures ... and the Dutch.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

If you would look at the submitter's text, and the fact that the submitter's URL is .be, it might occur to you that the submitter isn't a native Engish speaker, and figure he made a simple mistake. In fact, you might even surmise that the submitter is Belgian, and would therefore not be likely to be confused about what languages are spoken in Belgium.

Even if you're going to be a pedant, in the sentence "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN?", 'Belgian' could just as easily be read as a mistaken use of the adjective form instead of the noun form, i.e. "Will Google become irrelevant in Belgium...".

I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.

And I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on basic logic and common decency.

-Esme

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

There's no such thing as a language called 'Belgian.'
They speak Dutch (Flemish), French, and German.
I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.

I don't care what they call their language as long as they stay in South America where they belong.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

Belgians do not speak Belgian. They speak either French or a dialect of Dutch known as Flemish.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1604253, 00.html [timesonline.co.uk]

KFG

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average /.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.

Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.

There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is ... complicated, politically.

But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.

Block IPs?

Google should block the Newspaper's IP addresses so that their reporters cannot use Google in their research.

Re:Block IPs?

Nah. The newspaper's webmaster should just learn how to use the 'NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE' tag.

Re:Block IPs?

The newspaper's webmaster should just learn how to use the 'NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE' tag.

Bingo. If " 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." is accuarate, they failed to avail themselves of the quick, easy, and cheap solution. Obviously, that's not what it really was about.

I don't understand why news outlets get so upset when sites like google point people to their content. They should think of it as free advertising.

Don't worry its Belgium

As the old challenge goes, name 10 famous Belgians. Nice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.

Maybe its the start of something, all really dull places will sue to have their very dull news removed. After all, if something interesting happens there then one of the majors will cover it.

$1m a day... nice sense of perspective.

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

ice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.

Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official. I've always viewed it as sort of a hub, where influential Europeans meet to make decisions. But, I've never been there, so maybe my perspective is skewed.

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

No, you're talking about the wrong kind of famous person. I think the grandparent post meant the kind of famous people that most people have heard of.

Can I sue google for GPL violations?

Using the same logic as described here, I could probably sue Google for some GPL violations.

Some web sites incorrectly send all their contents as text/plain or text/html, including binary files, images, etc. It looks like Google tries to automatically correct this, but is not always successful (this may depend on the amount of plain text contained in the binary file). Anyway, regardless of the reason why it happens, it seems to be possible to find a few binary files in the Google cache (not easy, but possible if you are lucky). And now comes the problem if one of these files is protected by the GPL: if Google distributes the binary file but not the sources, they would be violating the GPL.

Who is going to start a frivolous lawsuit against Google for GPL violations?

"As can be seen by doing a search"?

What does "As can be seen by doing a search" mean? When I click the link I see lots of results from the site - I assumed that there were no results to be expected. Don't tell me the newspapers caved in so early...

Guess what?

Belguim is irrelevant anyway. Now that we can't find it through Google, it will quietly disappear in the back of the wardrobe, lost between Tanganyika and Cluj-Napoca.

Syncerus

French?

Stupid Flanders...

Big loss?

I think not for Google. It is funny.. that the newspapers don't keep their content, but are offended when somebody else picks up the ball for them.

In reality, there is value to keeping articles around, and I really wish that newspapers would take the initiative and do a better job with that.

Regardless, this is unfortunate. Perhaps the companies should just keep the articles around... and then they could make all this "money that google is making from the articles" for themselves.

Probably will be reversed

by the European court. Heck, it violates freedom of speech in essence. And, more importantly, linking/quoting has been proven to be not illegal in previous cases in the EU. Either they are all wrong, or the belgians are wrong. In my case, I come from the Netherlands, we know the answer ;=)

it's not this bad over here

at least i live in the states, where you can't just sue companies because you are too dense to learn the rules (such as robots.txt)

oh wait..

Google is taking risks

The bottom line is that any creative work is copyrighted such that only the "author" can authorise copies. Google is depending on authors not enforcing their rights against them to prevent them from making numerous copies (and from providing a service to provide those copies to anyone with Google cache). If I was to setup a site which simply allowed visitors to search (and download) all the binaries online would Linus/FSF/Microsoft not be justified in challenging me for illegally distributing their copyrighted works?

What about robots.txt?

I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt

Re:What about robots.txt?

Of course they have a right to exert control over it. But as a standard, most places would like their content indexed (how much work would it take to have an opt-in for every subdirectory on a site where content may belong to different authors?).
If they don't, as has happened, they stated "We do not want Google to index our pages without paying us lots of money, as google make money off the indexing and finding", and Google promptly took them out of the News and Search.
Now, they have exactly what they asked for. Google will make nothing from them.
However, as always happens, they didn't actually stop to think what this would REALLY mean. They called Google's bluff, expecting to make a lot of money from the deal. Google didn't bluff and said "Ok then, you're on your own".
Now, they're on their own, and will definitely lose the ongoing money obtained through the search engine hits Google provided to them (gratis, and subsidised only by their own index adverts on the way there. Everybody pays for PR after all).

Now, if things change to the point that all sites need to have something to opt in, on a per directory basis (otherwise you end up with a clash), or even per file (for the same reasons), the whole concept of indexing the web becomes impossible, or at least vastly more difficult. For example, you'd need to stamp a file that you wanted indexed using extensions to existing HTML, or in meta fields. And as a goodly many people who put pages up want them indexed, and use tools, then the tools will soon start having defaults of the 'index me' stamp. And then we're back to square one with more traffic being used uselessly.
So, you can either choose the opt out (and get free advertising into the bargain), and opt out where you wish, or choose a way that breaks the whole model for everyone.

The problem is Google Cache, I think

If I understand this correctly, the principal problem is not Google News but rather Google Cache. It seems that when news articles move from public to subscriber-only, Google retrieved the contents from its cache, instead of removing the article. So the issue was that Google was distributing articles instead of only linking them.

dont pee your pants

The biggest joke of the whole affair is that these newspapers apparently never heared about a robots.txt file and neither did the 'expert' that adviced the court in this matter. If I were google I'ld setup a little farm that would visit every single page on their website every millisecond, just to make sure that the moment the newspaper takes an article offline it gets removed from google cache as well. :o)

As with all things....

...greed is the great destroyer.

IAAB (I Am A Belgian)

So why does this still work http://news.google.com/news?ned=fr_be [google.com]

I still see "La Libre Belgique" a french speaking newspaper

But when I do this: http://news.google.be/news?ned=fr_be [google.be]

It's not there anymore.

Guess what Belgians will do next? BTW there is no such thing as Belgian waffles, Canadian Bacon, or Filet Americain. Right about the beer though!

GASP!!!

You mean I can't read earth-shattering news exclusively put on french-speaking, .be domains anymore? Whatever will we do now? Dear Jesus.. how will I survive when such a huge part of the internets has been torn away? How many tubes are left, oh harsh harsh world?

In all seriousness, I didn't know the french-speaking press of the Belgian world was so damn stupid. Most of their traffic probably comes from people accidentally clicking on links from google. Why would they do this? Money?

That's like kidnapping Dubya in Egypt and asking the Arabs for a ransom.

It's flipped

Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian [sic]?

Or will Belgium become irrelevant on Google?

chocolate

thats it! no more belgian chocolate for me! no more money for these belgian burgersmeisters

RSS Feeds

I've started using RSS feeds instead of going to multiple sites for my news. I don't want to rely on a single outlet for my news, and at the same time, I would like to be able to choose which feeds I get. I just go to my rss reader and grab all the feeds I want.

Google will not become irrelavant, if they are smart, because they have an online rss reader - Google Reader. It's still under "Google Labs", but if they started pushing this service where the news organizations are not allowing them. They could still pick up the ad revanue, and with less effort on their part.

The court documents reveals some interesting thing

Apparently, they have ordered these large fines thanks to the attitude of Google.

For example, google wasn't present in court and they didn't collaborate at all in the investigation.

So the newspapers won by default. Google "indifferent" attitude apparently annoyed the court, so they basically granted the demands of the newspaper.

For some reason that part isn't translated in the english version of the court document, but here it is (in French - quoted from the court documents) and a rough translation, done by myself, follows each quotes:

1."Attendu que le tribunal de céans ne manque pas d'être
surpris par l'attitude de la défenderesse qui n'a pas jugé utile
de participer à' la mission d'expertise, malgré les invitations
qui lui avaient été adressées par l'expert judiciaire, et qui ne
comparaît pas ;"
Translation:
The court is surprised by the attitude of the defendant which hasn't
found useful to participate in the expert evaluation[...]and who
aren't present in court.

2."Attendu que cette attitude constitue une indication de ce que
les craintes que nourrit la demanderesse sur la mauvaise
volontk que mettra à la d4fenderesse à s'exécuter pourraient
être fondées ;"
Translation:
This attitude is an indication that the fears of the plaintiff
about the bad faith of the defendant might be justified.

3."Que l'attitude de la défenderesse est d'autant plus
surprenante que dans d'autres pays, cettes plus importants
que la Belgique, la défenderesse s'est engagée dans des
négociations avec les 4diteurs de journaux pour résoudre la
question du respect des droits d'auteur ;"
Translation:
That the attitude of the defendant is more so surprising
that in other countries, certainly bigger than Belgium,
the defendant had been negociating with newspapers editors to
solves the copyrights and intellectual properties issues.

Also, the court order isn't just about the Soir Libre newspaper, but about all newspapers editors, journalists, etc represented by cafepresse.

Belgium vs Google : some accurate info

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

What is this "Belgium"?

Everone knows that Belgium doesn't exist [zapatopi.net]...

French AND German

TFA refers to German language Belgian news as well.

I am not curious enough to go through and check, but Google should be blocking French and German language papers, while allowing other Belgian sites (Flemish and foreign-language [English?]) to be indexed. Are they going to just stop indexing all Belgian sites?

As well, there are many French language papers which are not based in Belgium. Are they being blocked?

I bet their traffic won't be hit

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?

I reckon there's no way that'd happen. I can count the number of people I know who use Google News on one hand (here in Europe). It's really not that popular. I'd be surprised if even 1% of their audience was using it.

How can we expect to rewrite history?

"...one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself,..."

How can these papers expect to rewrite history if their old articles can be found, unfiltered, on Google Cach?
This violation of these news papers Intellectual Property must be stopped for the public good.

Google post a link

Google post a link the Chilling Effects with the court order
This is almost as funny as one of those Japanese instruction manuals
http://engrish.com/ [engrish.com]

the question is not what will Google do,

Google will simply drop any links to the site.

The question is what will the news paper do now that they've "won" and become invisible on the internet?

The victory is a Phyric one at best.

Nobody will ever be referred to their site when they are searching for the information on Google.

Its stupid and self-destructive.

The paper will eventually fold from lack of readership while their neighbors across the street, who can still be found on the web, will go on...

Who cares?

In related news...

...AFP sued Google in 2005 for the same reasons [google.com].

MS services are popular in Belgium

It's really hard to say how this would affect Google's positions in Belgium but what I noticed is that people here, especially the youth, lots of them are really affected by MS services. I mean 9 e-mails out of 10 belongs to hotmail and the second thing you might be asked (after your GSM number) is what's your MSN?

Though Google search is really at the top here. Even guys at the universities recommends using it.
I am sure they will find some kind of agreement. I wouldn't like to lose all the results coming from Le Soir, La Libre or whatever. And I surely won't change my favourite search engine.

I am very happy with this

What google is doing and almost everybody else here is pointing towards robots.txt. For me that is an opt-out. Apparently when it is google, t is OK. It is just when Joe Spammer uses it as an excuse, it is BAD.

Why not have nobody indexed, exept those that want to. Will that ever be done? No. Will then even more garbadge be indexed then now? Yes.
Yet an opt-in is the only logical way to handle things.

Google indexes my site. This gives Google an added value. Google does not pass this on to me. Also Google is not 'free'. It is gratis, just like TV and in returnd wants me to watch ads.

So even as great as Google (or any other searchengine) is, it should have been opt-in from the start. Now it is too late. :-(

Re:Uh...

Nice one, post a google.com link to disprove comments about google.be. Let me break it down for you. .com != .be

Why only google.be, not google.com/.fr?

Yes, but the poster makes an important point. google.be is blocking the sites, but google.com is not. google.fr is not either.

It seems like the block has no practical effect, since you can find everything by going to google.com or .fr instead. It would be different if Google were removing lesoir.be and other sites from all searches (including google.com searches) by computers with Belgian IP addresses, but are they? If not, Belgians will probably switch to google.fr/.com rather than MSN.

I don't know why they did this for .be. Could it be because .be servers are actually in Belgium, and thus are somehow legally affected? That's the only way I can think of that this block makes sense.

Re:Abusing monopoly

Well, ther really is no monopoly here. And the barrier of switching to some other search-engine is very low, so it's not like Google could force anyone to use their service. And like it or not, Google is under no obligation to serve those newspapers. Apparently they don't want to work with Google, so why should Google work for them?

And besides, payback is a bitch.

Freedom waffles?

Would those have strawberries, whipped cream, and blueberries?

I want some.

Re:Abusing monopoly

Neither does Microsoft on operating system. Yet their market share is significant enough that they have to obey monopoly rules.

Re:Abusing monopoly

This is not entirely clear, but it seems Google is abusing their near monopoly on search to strong arm their position in a new market of News.

The last numbers I saw placed Google as having about 45% of the search market. That isn't even in the running for being a monopoly.

Their have been ordered to remove other peoples news from their news service, and have decided to additional punish the source by also removing them from the search index.

As far as I can tell, there is no way in which this ruling applies to news.google.com that does not apply equally to google.com search. If one is ruled illegal by the courts, the other is probably just as illegal, so it makes sense to remove them from both.

I really thing Google should be allowed to link any news together in a news service, but escalating the issue to searching is really abusive and something I am quite sure they will be punished for in Europe. (Besides the obvious fact that it IS EVIL).

If Google had a monopoly, this could be an antitrust issue, but I've seen no evidence of that. There are a lot of players in the search market and Google has instituted absolutely no lock-in of any kind. Nothing stops Belgians from moving to something else, aside from the fact that the others tend to be lower quality. I don't foresee any antitrust action against them for this, nor any grounds for it. Since they don't wield monopoly influence in the market, I don't see how this is "evil."

RTF ruling

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;

All sites, not just news. It seems that the news site wants to punish itself.

Re:Can we get some editing here please?

The problem was that the newssite of French and German speaking Belgium had articles indexed by google (I believe it's about Le Soir [lesoir.be]), and that didn't pose any problem.

They changed the way the articles were accessible and made a "pay to view"-service, yet google had cached the newsarticles offering them "for free" (as the previously were offered publicly for free)

The problem for them was in how Google had a cache of something that wasn't free anymore, violating their copyright.

The link to the article on vrtnieuws [vrtnieuws.net] as a Belgian newssite is misleading as vrtnieuws is a Flemish (Dutch speaking) newssite. In the audio fragment the interviewer wonders wherever it's not "good publicity" to have google link to your content and the specialist agrees with that how newssites "like" that, but explains the articles didn't link back to the website to the updated or removed content which posed the problem: their content being cached, freely accessable when they charged for it, and no link back to their webpage.

Re:Can we get some editing here please?

unless you doubt the existence of Belgium (and let's not get in to that here).

Hmm. Another conspiracy by the evil cartographers [uidaho.edu]? Did you know that more than 99% of all maps are made by cartographers? Definitely some sort of conspiracy going on here.

Re:Abusing monopoly

Their have been ordered to remove other peoples news from their news service, and have decided to additional punish the source by also removing them from the search index.

Or, they removed them from the search to preclude getting sued for news articles that show up in a general search (as opposed to showing up on the news.google.com site). Sounds practical to me.

Re:Can we get some editing here please?

Agreed - editors are the one thing why sites like slashdot are worthwhile compared with digg. If you only want to read random shit written by monkeys digg is unbeatable, slashdot should be different

Re:Abusing monopoly

First of all, I have no evidence to suggest that Google is not strong arming the entire French speaking population of Belgium (or at least their news services. I think it would be more reasonable, however, to consider that faced with a fine of $1 million a day, they took the most efficient route of removing the listings from Google News.

Also, IDNSF (I do not speak French), but the summary seems to suggest that the content needed to be removed from Google's "cache" as well. It may be that because of the language used, the ruling required removal of the listings from the search index as well...

Re:Can we get some editing here please?

Could the editors PLEASE edit these things for a little clarity? About halfway through the submission I just quit reading because it's so disjointed and repetitive that I can't tell if there's one event here or two or none.

Please, of the love of God, EDIT editors!

Score:-1, Offtopic? My ass! The poster above has a very good point (and I am not he). The summary is very disjointed and difficult to read. Offtopic huh? Bullshit, its exactly on topic. Where else was he supposed to post that obseravtion, in another thread? Quit sucking slashass, moderators or you're going to suck the colon right out of them, then what will you do?

Re:Abusing monopoly

Aren't their news and general search one and the same though? One is just a little more automated way of pulling news stories for you.

Also, Google is not a near monopoly in Europe. Only in the US do they serve something like 87% of the searches.

Re:Abusing monopoly

From a quick glance at the ruling on chilling effects, the defene google put together (citing copyright law, database laws, etc) was not valid.

The ruling specifically talks about google's "cache". This would include the search cache.

In other words, they probably have good legal advice to remove these sites from the search cache (not just news) because these companies would be able to sue them again with exactly the same complaint for having their content in the search index.

It would be a legal liability to keep them in the search index.

Re:Abusing monopoly

The newspaper have made it clear they do not want their content cached by Google. Now, you may or may not be aware of this, but it's not just Google news that does caching, the main search does it too. So, how is Google meant to link to the news site without caching any data? This is less an example of Google exercising some monopolistic strong arm tactics and more an example of how a news site getting greedy and not understanding the web can come back to bite them in the behind. It's less evil, and more ironic.

Re:Abusing monopoly

To search things Google needs an archive of the site. Read the ruling. It basically says Google can't build such an archive, because it is "copying". So what would you suggest Google do?

Re:Abusing monopoly

escalating the issue to searching is really abusive

Why?

Google just got sued by these guys for indexing their site. When you lose a lawsuit with ignorant assholes (i.e. anyone running a business on the web who doesn't use robots.txt and then complains about being indexed), the safest thing to do is make completely sure there's nothing left by which they can leverage that lawsuit into something like a contempt complaint.

Of course, not being indexed by Google can apparently be the basis for a lawsuit, too. Damned if you do...