Google News Found Guilty of Copyright Violation

schmiddy writes "A court in Brussels, Belgium, has just found Google guilty of violating copyright law with its Google News aggregator. According to the ruling, Google News' links and brief summaries of news sources violates copyright law. Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs. Although Google plans to appeal, this ruling could have chilling effects on fair use rights on the web in the rest of Europe as well if other countries follow suit."

HHGTTG reference

So is this where 'Belgium!' becomes the most obscene word in the cosmos?

Saw This Yesterday

Is this any different from http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/13/13 44248 [slashdot.org]yesterday's story or has Google been involved in multiple court cases in Belgium?

Re:Saw This Yesterday

The submitter tried to search for the story using google but couldn't find it.

Re:Saw This Yesterday

No, they're the same case. The original article:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM .20070213.w2belggoogle0213/BNStory/Business/home [theglobeandmail.com]

This article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/business/14googl e.html?_r=2&ref=business&oref=slogin&oref=slogin [nytimes.com]

Notice they both talk about Google News and a group of French newspapers.

Re:Saw This Yesterday

google should have no qualms about just dropping those sites from ALL of its search engines (make them feel the crunch THAT way) to deal with it.

This is now a marketting leverage that Google I think should use until such time as someone calls them a monopoly on it and pulls anti-trust action on them.

From a customer standpoint, we use their site under their terms of service.

So too should an indexed site. Want to be indexed by Google so the world can find you? Agree to their terms of letting them cache your material. Some negotiations might be made for the size of the cache and the duration of it should your site be pulling stuff from the "free" zone, but generally, if you want to be found, you have to agree to be stored.

What's good for the goose...

Maybe Google should just delink the sites altogether, that way the offended media organizations can watch their traffic plummet to zero?

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

No, but I've seen a lot of users go to www.cnn.com by means of entering www.cnn.com in google's search box.

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

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

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

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

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

This would work both ways though. People only use Google as their address bar because they are pretty certain the website will come up. National newspapers and other mainstream media websites are normally some of the highest traffic websites (in terms of unique hits) on the internet for any specific country, therefor by not linking to the media websites Google would also be doing themselves quite a lot of harm.

If people typed in searches like 'www.nytimes.com', 'www.cnn.com', 'www.bbc.co.uk' into google and it didn't mention the respective websites then a lot of people would probably start switching their homepage away from Google.

I therefore doubt Google will consider de-listing mainstream newspaper websites. It would give Google an immense commercial disadvantage to their rivals!

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

Maybe Google should just delink the sites altogether, that way the offended media organizations can watch their traffic plummet to zero?

From the article:

Google carries advertising on its general Belgian site, Google.be, but not in its news index. Links to the publications represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from both.

And the Belgians win

Or to put it another, more accurate way, they lose.

This is what happens when business is run by those who fail to understand it, or indeed to even know what their actual core business IS. C'est la guerre.

Fair use vs. copy of?

I'm not sure how much aggregation Google news does, but I'd think if they're copying in less than 10% or so of the story and providing a link to the original they'd be safely in the "fair use" arena.

I suspect this has more with newspapers getting annoyed that people are starting to type in "[MyCity] news" in Google more often than looking up their local newspaper's web site. The newspapers also would like to restrict access to their "archives" (which they regard as a pay-to-see resource).

Re:Fair use vs. copy of?

Fair use is a US concept. The 10% if it exists is probably a US thing as well. In the UK it's 5%, and only a single article. In belgium it's probably something different.

Google news is unashamedly breaking copyright.. there's no argument there - the real question is why anyone would prosecute over something that's driving hits to their page and generating ad revenue?

The exponents hurt my brain

Slashdot said $1250/day yesterday and $32,600/day today. Will hate to see how much they loose a day for copyright violations in about a week!

MY new business model

1) make any sort of "news alike" copyrighted content. Does not matter quality as long as there is quantity.
2) MAKE SURE that my robot.txt allow google.fr to index
3) wait
4) leave the content at the same place but put a password
5) sue google.fr for copyright infringement.
6) profit


Strange, I think I forgot the ?? step somewhere...

Belgium IS NOT FRANCE!!! FFS

slashdot: Belgium
aepervius: google.fr

I'm guessing you're one of the 75% of Yanks who thinks "passport" is a request to share fortified wine, right?

Clue: google.be [google.be] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium [wikipedia.org]

Differences between France and Belgium:
* Most Belgians speak Dutch, not French.
* In Belgium's extremely long varied history of occupation, the French occupied it for less than 25 years.
* Belgium still has a King. France killed all of theirs more than two hundred years ago.
* Belgium is NOT famous for good food. Trust me on this one. Typical menu: Ham and cheese with fries. Cheese fries with ham. Ham and fries with cheese. Pick any combination of the three. The fries are more like British "chips" except they are fried twice to make them crispier.

Re:Belgium IS NOT FRANCE!!! FFS

"Belgium is NOT famous for good food. Trust me on this one"

I won't trust you. As a matter a fact, you are straight out lying. I am married to a Belgian woman, and been to Belgium several times, and I can tell you from personal experience that they do have excellent food beyond "Ham and fries with cheese". Most of the food I tried was French influenced, cooked with a lot of wine, red and white meats, sea food, etc. Delicious stuff. I don't think one has to even mention their world renown deserts (chocolate, waffles) and beers.

That history of occupation you mentioned influenced Belgian cuisine a lot. It has allowed it to offer a magnificent mix of tastes from that part of Europe while still keeping a Belgian signature on the dishes. If there is one thing Belgians know how to do, it is eat and drink. Belgium cuisine may not be the most famous in the world but it is not something to sniff at, it is quiet good.

hmm

Sounds like they're biting the hand that feeds them. There was a rush of articles a while back where web analysts were blaming google for being a sort of web vampire/leech, sucking the blood out of websites without providing anything back. Those claims have quited because businesses realized that when they changed their model to accommodate the search centric interweb, times were good.

You leave google, google leaves you. Buh-bye, thank-you for flying the interweb air, we hope you enjoyed your time on interweb and also hope to see you again soon.

IP Rights.

Are going to destroy the world as we know it. ( well, that and the lawyers ).

Its more insidious then any terrorist group, or rouge nation.

reminds me of France and iTunes

This reminds me of when France was going to force Apple to open iTunes, and Apple said fine, we'll leave. Or when the EU took on Microsoft. Once companies get to be a certain size, its really difficult for countries to control them, especially when the controls will end up hurting their corporate citizens, as in this case. When Google stops linking to their newpapers, the newspapers will feel the pain, not Google. Especially since all of Google's competitors will have to play by the same rules, and can't provide unique content. If the governments were right in these cases, and could take the moral highground, then they might stand a chance of winning. However, by continuing to fight huge tech companies in these areas, where they can't win, they stand to lose the power to fight when it really matters. Also, in each case, there were other ways of dealing with the problem. Don't like MS bundling? Move the government to Linux, save money, and encourage your population to do the same. Don't like iTunes and the way Fairplay is locked down? Start a competitor, or encourage the labels to stop their love affair with DRM. Don't like Google lnking to news stories? Update your robot.txt to prevent cache's and Google indexing your site to begin with. Of course, they know they can't do that. They want to come up on Google searches, but not have Google index their content as well. Would you like to have that cake you just ate, anyone?

Scary!

So this quote:

South Korea and its partners in international efforts to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons programs welcomed on Wednesday the agreement reached in Beijing to shut the Communist state's main nuclear reactor.

... could be a case of copyright infrigement on the International Herald Tribune?!

Besides, why are these guys trying to stop Google from linking to their web site?

Reserve the right to refuse service

Google should just stop listing the offended site. I know it sets up precedence in court, but Google should just stop crawling the site. See how long before the sites' hits drop so low they start begging Google to list them again.

Where do I begin?

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery.

What else would you expect from the country that gave us Dr. Evil's (adoptive)father? Its still not enough to make me quit eating their waffles or chocolate. MMMMM....chocolate Belgium waffles

conversation

I find it difficult to reconcile because I think of the internet far more as a conversation than a transmission. And so passing on links and summaries is more like repeating in abbreviated form something you overheard (or were in the audience for) in your own words but with enough extra info they can go and look for themselves.

Why Not Use Real Nerd Numbers?

Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs.

That's awfully close to a nerd number: 2 to the power of 15 = $32,768 [google.ca] [1]. We are talking about computers here, and there's nothing computers like more then binary numbers! Maybe the court was being generous by choosing a slightly lower number. What do you think Google will do with that *extra* $168 dollars a day they are not being charged?

[1] For the fun of it, I used Google Calculator to give the proof, and yes the Caret [wikipedia.org] symbol is really a bitwise operator but not according to Google Calculator. I suppose one could say that Google is guilty of "Bitwise Violation" also...but that's for another article ;)

Would it have killed you...

.. to title this story "Brussels Sprouts Stink"

Fair Use?

This has nothing to do with fair use. Google is using copyrighted material to turn a profit. We're not talking about some not for profit blogger here or a journalist sighting portions of an article on some other site to further a point. This is Google using copyrighted material to turn a profit in the form of increased advertising revenue and the company in question has every right to sue to prevent others from profiting from content that they have created.

robots.txt

If they don't want to be scanned by google, create the file.
If they do want to be scanned (and therefore indexed as well as cached) then don't.

Although, I for one, would prefer that we would have to *create* the file, and add entries that could say:
Scan=Yes
Index=Yes
Cache=No

If no robots.txt file is found, then do nothing for the site.

Time to tighten the belt

Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs.

FROM: Eric Schmidt

TO: All Google Employees

Beginning today, employees will no longer be eligible for free Kona coffee and hourly massages. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Lazy belgian webmasters (use robots.txt)

Why not just use robots.txt?

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

[from google's blog]

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

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

This looks familiar

I recall seeing this exact situation played out in some flash video that was trying to predict the future of the internet, google in particular. Anyone else see it? The only difference was that in the video it was the NY times that was suing google.

The problem is one of money.

If I have a news article on my site, I want people to come to my site to read it. Why? Simple. I got advertising up there. However, when people don't come to my site, I lose money. And if they're going to google instead of my site for the story, then I do blame google. Personally, I've got my eye on Sentinel from http://www.blogwerx.com/ [blogwerx.com] - they were at the Demo Conference this year, and I'm looking forward catching me some sploggers!

links?

Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs

linking to an external site doesnt break a copyright, if the site that is being linked to has the system in place to disable a page after a certain amount of time (which is what the whole argument is over). so, google can link to the pages all they want, as long as they dont display any of the material longer than it is publicly available on the original site.

OLD SCHOOL

This is just another good example of companies who want to live in the old way the are used to doing business. Sure their profits are shrinking but they will shrink just as fast if Google doesn't use their news. I would guess (based on no facts) that this will hurt them, it will only cut the number of people that have the chance to get to their site which means less ad revenue for them. Google news is more like the yellow pages than anything. I look up what I need then call them or in this case go to there site to meet my specific needs.

I'm sure Google can implement a solution

Google is run by a lot of really bright people. It would be seemingly trivial for them to develop a natural language parsing engine that would "rewrite" the introduction or summary for linked stories. Perhaps even condense them so that a realistic summary will fit in the few lines provided for each story on google news. After all, copyright law is only violated when something is copied verbatim; if it is rewritten, then no actual copying takes place. You may run into some issues regarding the thumbnailed images but I think that, too, could be overcome (make them greyscale and cropped differently, for example).

oldnews

That was about a year ago... and google delisted all belgian sites the same day... serves them right...

by the way this ruling did NOT have chilling effects on fair use rights on the web in the rest of Europe...

I dont get it

are business schools really churning out graduates that are this stupid? Are they actually teaching people that litigation is a valid income generation model? Its free adverstising for gods sake, not lost revenue. Doesnt anyone see the flawed logic in the lost revenue thinking? 1) Its free advertising, my guess is a link on google news actually brings in more revenue and 2) Who the hell would come to your lame ass news site if they werent referenced to it from google? I know I wouldnt go to half the news sites I go to if they werent referenced on google news, because I never would have heard of them. I can understand the *IAA using this kind of flawed logic, snorting coke off of hookers asses all day has to have an detrimental effect on a persons cognitive processes. But this? This is just ridiculous. I hope they go out of business.

Go Ahead Make My Day Copyright Holders

I hope that dozens of media outlets across Europe block all search engines from listing them. That way their web sites will become cob webs and smarter media will allow search engines to freely list their web site and drive tons of traffic to their web site. Face it Google, MSN and yahoo are providing free advertising to these media outlets.
  A smart business man in Belgium will set up a site and allow the search engines to freely list the articles and media content and drive the rest of the media out of business.

OSTG, beware!

You better not be making money out of Slashdot ;-)
http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/what-the -google-decision-means-for-social-media.html [pronetadvertising.com]

No reasoning for some

This just won't stand up in higher courts, it can't. The net would fall over if this case stands the appeal. This would mean that any online search engine that returned snippits of the site (google, MS, Yahoo, Altavista etc. etc. etc) would be in contravention of copyright. Are we going to have search links returned and that is all? How useful would THAT be...NOT.

How about quoting? Is this no longer alowed outside the educational realm? If I quote someone as part of a link, that would be wrong? Slashdot is in for it then too.

This is bigger than on the face of it seems and it is merely the newspapers attempt to get some of google's cash, which is ok by me cause google should just cut them off and blacklist them. Bye bye paper goodbye.

Karem

Grow up!

What the hell is wrong with these Belgian newspapers?

Their own damn fault for putting RSS feeds and all that stuff for Google to find.

This Frantic Industries (http://franticindustries.com/blog/2007/02/14/no-l inks-no-web/ [franticindustries.com]) post gives a good parallel to this:

It's like giving away apples but then complaining if the guy you gave the apples to gives them away to someone else. Who are they gonna sue next, the RSS readers like Bloglines for picking up their content?

Seriously, guys. Grow up.

Forced?

"A court in Brussels, Belgium..."

"...Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day..."

Ummm, how exactly are they going to FORCE Google to pay? I suppose Belgium could force Google to close any branch offices they might have in Belgium, and they could certainly take China's approach of setting up a national firewall to try and keep traffic to Google blocked... but forcing them to pay? They can bombard the Google headquarters with legal requests, and spam the US courts to try and bring a suit against them in the US, but what else can they actually do?

One supposes the Dictator of Sealand could decide he hates Microsoft and will FORCE them to pay $1000 a day until they fix the product they sold him?

In the free world

Everyone should have a right to copy.

Re:Slashdot found guilty of editorialism violation

They can't look back that far for articles, it was posted NEARLY 24 hours ago.

Re:Do socialist countries just hate big business?

Yes. Yes they do. Socialism has always been "big business OMG EVIL CAPITALISTS STABBITYSTABSTAB DIE DIE DIE" regardless of the particular merits or vices of the business in question. Except when the Big Business in question is The Government. Then it's all okay.

Re:Do socialist countries just hate big business?

Can you say 'retarded judge'?

Re:Slashdot found guilty of editorialism violation

similar headline, but not the same case. that one was about google's web caching, this one is about google news.

Re:Do socialist countries just hate big business?

Belgium isn't a socialist country. I'll refrain from the usual anti-american comments, though they've rarely been more adequate.

Belgium [wikipedia.org] is a constitutional monarchy, and it's current prime minister [wikipedia.org] is a member of the VLD party [wikipedia.org], which started out as a right-wing party and has since moved towards a centrist view.

You can read it all on Wikipedia if you spend 30 seconds looking for it. Provided you don't consider reading a socialist skill.

Re:Do socialist countries just hate big business?

Um, Socialism has a whole spectrum of definitions. France and Sweden call themselves socialist, aren't too hard for a Belgian to visit, and are very similar in practice to what the gp described (high taxes, large public sector, etc.). Also, I don't know why Russia, Poland, Romania, or the now historical East Germany would have been called socialist in the past. They went right past socialist and straight to dysfunctional communism.

But, like I originally said, I suspect it all depends on your definition... Most of the readers here will accept that Western Europe is mostly socialist and that Eastern European countries are still figuring things out after their experience with communism (not socialism). But I do remember that the USSR stood for "United Soviet Socialist Republics", even though nobody in the West ever really bought the assertion that the USSR was a socialist state... so clearly it isn't only you.

Regards,
Ross

Re:Do socialist countries just hate big business?

Do socialist countries just hate big business?

Well, yes, by definition socialists are trying to take control of production out of the hands of large businesses and into the hands of the workers. That being said, Belgium is a pretty moderate country as far as Europe goes.

Please debate on the merits of the case, not on stereotypes and idealogical generalizations.

Re:Fair use

Sure, but other countries have similar code. Things like "fair dealing" and "Limitations and exceptions to copyright." Of course IANAL, and some of my info came from wikipedia (that bastion of truth and NPOV).