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Legal Woes for Google News Belgium  (View post)

Teodor Filimon [PersonRank 3]

Monday, September 18, 2006
17 years ago4,627 views

I agree about the weird stuff; a lot of people wouldn't even visit a newspaper's site if it weren't for Google News, so i think they only had to gain from the past situation.

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

C.f. http://blogoscoped.com/forum/67883.html

Norman David Gerre [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Not every country has a legal concept of "fair use". I'm fairly sure the Australian version is completely illegal, for instance, because the excerpts aren't being used for comment, criticism, parody etc. The legislation was drafted long before aggregation was an issue. (The law has since been updated, but I can't remember if it's actually made it through parliament yet or just been drafted.)

Seth Finkelstein [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

It seems Belgium doesn't have US-style "fair use"

Note text of notice at:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/international/notice.cgi?NoticeID=5133

"- Find that the defendant cannot exercise any exception provided in the law relating to copyright and ancillary rights (1991) and on the law on data bases (1998);

- Find that the activities of Google News and the use of the "Google cached violate in particular the laws on copyright and ancillary rights (1994) and the law on data bases (1998);"

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I get the feeling any country without a "fair use" concept could also sue Google for web (and image) search result snippets?

Pascal Van Hecke [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

[put at-character here] Norman , Seth, Philipp: the concepts of "fair use" and the legislation on copyright and intellectual property are the same everywhere in the EU (and pretty identical to that in the US). I doubt that the ruling as it is now, will be upheld. If so, it would constitute a dangerous precedent, see my analysis at: http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2006/09/17/belgian-court-ruling-on-google-news-both-confusing-and-a-dangerous-precedent/

damien [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

They shooted in their own foot ...
thanx for the link Philipp

Ratatösk [PersonRank 2]

17 years ago #

Google News only helps those pages, they get a lot of free traffic. It's just stupid to sue them for that. The only reason could be that you get more money from a court ruling than your page makes

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Google is aware of the case since... last Friday, only.
   They will make a claim ("appeal"?) that's why there is no message on google.be about thise case.

Pierre S [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Le Soir is shooting themselves in the foot.
Being removed from Google's index means less trafic, less advertisement incomes and so on...
My guess is that they will soon beg their reinclusion.

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Pierre, you are ABSOLUTELY right
I know that there was a similar case with a French online newspaper : they asked to not appear anymore in google news, when google do that, their traffic falls so quickly and strongly that they directly ask to google to reindex them as soon as possible...

/pd [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

So ,what I am hearing here is that even if the "fair use" case, violations do occur. But the outcome of removing the page , also has a backlash effort which diminishes ranking/traffic and eventual revenue for a company ??

Can this not be thought of as a monolopy too ? If you screw with the Indexing within Google, google makes you suffer ? (ok rather indirectly!!)

Andrew Hitchcock [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Where do they get off fining Google a million Euros a day? Google should just drop that website from News and every other service they use. That'd solve the problem.

Also, while I defend Google for news, images, and web snippets, I side more with the book publishers for book search. The big difference is that websites have a standard means of blocking their content from being indexed (robots.txt) and it works retroactively, so any past indexed content will be removed. Books, on the other hand, have no such way of specifying "please don't index me". Book search should have been opt-in from the beginning, in my opinion.

Mysterius [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Google Book Search isn't hurting the sales of books, though. Like Google's other services, it helps direct users to books they might not have found otherwise. And Google did (or does?) allow book publishers to request the removal of any book of theirs from their book index.

Erju Ackman [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Belgians are biting the hand that feeds them.Typical EU shortsightedness.

Huw Leslie [PersonRank 1]

17 years ago #

Google has made an example of Le Soir, and is obviously attempting to deter people from making any future claims against them.

It's a great/immoral way to use a monopoly – if the GOOG really hurts Le Soir they make themselves more powerful than the Belgium legal system.

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