Google Relents, Publishes Belgian Ruling

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."

Yes, but...

Can you read it in China?

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Yes, I just checked.

Copyright is copyright

I am all for fair use. But the fact that Google copies, changes, reassembles, etc. copyrighted information without anyone's consent should be challenged. The challenge, while difficult to overcome at first 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.

Re:Copyright is copyright

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

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This is a concept of common law, however, and an intentional loophole in the treaty; individual nations don't have to allow for "fair use." Apparently, Belgium doesn't.

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No, Google works under the premise that if you put it on the Internet you're giving people a licence to read it.
As for them changing the content, where are they doing that? Truncating it, sure, but no real modifications.

Re:Copyright is copyright

They show the first paragraph and a link to the article. That's just like the context google shows when you search for a term. Now about the court order, there was only one party at the hearing, google never got an invitation. This is one of those fast procedures, and being a belgian myself, I truely believe our courts are perfectly capable of messing up like this. This is not the last of it; google will want to defend itself.

killing fair use/public domain through FUD

But the fact that Google copies, changes, reassembles, etc. copyrighted information without anyone's consent should be challenged.

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.

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And yet again I'm ashamed being Belgian, luckily I can still be proud being Flemish (Dutch speaking Belgian).

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

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The challenge, while difficult to overcome at first 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

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i've seen to many patents/copyright lawsuits, i'm all for breaking copyright/patents.. monkeys and their damn text with mumble jumble.. who cares.. i will not obey your patents and copieright i wil continue to disobey until you lie in your own shit, with a

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That is the most accurate analogy I have ever heard.

And the Belgian newspapers will see a drop

in webtraffic.

Good for them.

Will they sue Yahoo/MSN next?

Re:And the Belgian newspapers will see a drop

You bet they'll see a drop in traffic, try googling for site http://www.lesoir.be/ [lesoir.be] on google.be, or news.google.be. You don't just get the ruling, you get a message that thousands of results have been deleted. Dutch-language papers, such as http://www.hln.be/ [www.hln.be] are still available and in the cache.

If you do the right search in Google, you'll turn up the following message:

In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 1260 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.

and the following link [chillingeffects.org] and comparison [chillingeffects.org]

I don't get it

I still fail to see how it is a copyright infringement to link to news articles? It's not like Google is hosting the article on it's own website...it's linking. It's a shame that companies are so money hungry that they want to be paid for someone directing traffic to their site. Next business will want money from taxi drivers for delivering customers.

Re:I don't get it

I still fail to see how it is a copyright infringement to link to news articles? It's not like Google is hosting the article on it's own website.

According to the ruling I'm reading right now on google.be, I can sum up your misunderstanding in two words: Google cache.

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I never followed the stories enough to ever consider Google Cache.

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does google.be not follow robots.txt?

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does google.be not follow robots.txt?

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 t

Re:I don't get it

robots.txt is an opt-out. The law in Belgium requires an opt-in, not an opt-out.

Re:I don't get it

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.

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I can repsond in on comarison: Opt-out against opt-in.

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 newsartic

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Actually, if the newspaper staff themselves had ever submitted their URL to google for inclusion after Google had deployed their caching technology, Google should appeal this and countersue the paper for willful negligence, fraud, extortion, and anything e

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"It's not like Google is hosting the article on it's own website"

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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Next business will want money from taxi drivers for delivering customers.

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 wh

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What I don't get is why the newspaper in question didn't just throw up a robots.txt file [robotstxt.org], blocking Google's news spiders, and then ask politely for Google to remove all existing content from their indexes.

I guess they'd just rather flex some highly paid la

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The problem is not with new articles; the problem is that the newspaper has a model where everybody can read new articles, but only paying subscribers can see old archived articles.

If Google stores the articles, everybody can read the old articles without

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I think it depends on the headline and interest to a person. For instance, a headline "10% more people buy cars than trucks", I wouldn't even consider clicking on the headline. I simply don't care. Now, "Glock to buy Heckler and Koch", I would definitel

Minitruth

apparently, in Europe, the Ministry of Truth is working well - making sure that old news doesn't rear it ugly head to compete with the news of today.

The court order is meaningless

I went over to www.google.be. No one will know what's going on--the whole thing is written in Belgian. Brilliant, Google!

Re:The court order is meaningless

Your post seems to be in American.

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Yeah, but it's still gibberish to me. I'm not good at legalese [slashdot.org].

Incompetence at work

Any competent web developer should know how to use the The Robots Exclusion Protocol [robotstxt.org] to prevent crawlers from crawling/indexing a web site. Why News Sites do not want to be visited by Google is really beyond me - it is free advertising! Visitors still have

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The news sites want to be crawled and indexed by Google, and show up in their search results. They just want to control the user experience for what articles are visible, what advertising is displayed, etc. Google news takes that control away from them.

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However, if a site doesn't have a robots.txt file, should search engines just presume that the site has given permission for the page to be cached?

As a web user, I prefer it like that, but I can understand the point of view that permission should be actual

The realization will set in...

... that by banning Google from reprinting their stories, they have shot themselves in the revenue-hungry foot. Without Google serving up ads for them or redirects to their pages that contain ads, I predict a massive drop in their internet based income. It

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by banning Google from reprinting their stories, they have shot themselves in the revenue-hungry foot. Without Google serving up ads for them or redirects to their pages that contain ads, I predict a massive drop in their Internet based income.

I know it

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Sure, maybe for the moment, but I think you'd be surprised as to how rapidly their subscription fees are dwindling. Who needs a newspaper when you can get all of your news faster and cheaper with Google?

The loss of their ability to be the only news sourc

Missing the Point

The issue isn't about linking or copyright or caching. Google lost the case. They removed the offending content.

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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It's common in Belgium and in France (maybe it's a Civil Law thing?). For "press crimes" like slander and libel, the publication of the verdict is usually required, sometimes in several newspapers.

One word...

Belgium [wikipedia.org]!!

As an act of protest...

I will now boycott Stella Artois!

....eh, fuck this. *cracks another one open*

Do No Evil?

Google's motto of "Do No Evil" has one very distinct flaw:

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.

Damn, you beat me to it! That's what I was thinking, too.

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...

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"Risking $500k a day in fines from a country with 10 million residents? No WAY it's remotely worth it"

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 s

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You must be an American. If you didn't know, Belgium is THE economic hub for Europe. Not only do all roadways, waterways, railways meet there, also quite some important political and economical centers and buildings are located there (The European Union it

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china > belgium

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First, Google is doing this with the web site's owner's consent: it's an Internet standard that you give or deny consent with a robots.txt file. If the Belgian web sites don't exclude Google with their robots.txt file, obviously the web site owner has give

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I'm with Google over the issue of news.google.com but their behaviour after they lost the court case has really challenged their credibility over their "do no evil" policy.

They could have easily just complied with the court order but instead they had to

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This is manipulating search data for political purposes to suit their own agenda. It raises doubts in my mind about how much I can trust their search engine to try and be accurate, honest and to help me find what I'm looking for.

Now they're just another gr