Oh my.

That's a lot of writing!

Is there an english translation?

I'm not 100% sure but this file may contain the English version:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/international/notice.cgi?action=image_7796 [PDF]

"or perhaps, it’s the Belgian law system which looks ridiculous now"
I don't think so
I don't know if in Germany or in the USA it's usual, but in France many medias (usually tabloids, sometimes websites) must place this kind of judgement of their Front Page.

Example : look at the bottom of the Front page of "Voici", a famous French tabloid, from this week :

http://www.voici.fr/contenu_editorial/images/commun/couv.jpg

And as said Franck Poisson, former boss of Google France : "hey Sergey, you should remove the <I'm feeling lucky> button from Google.be :)"

Just FYI, this crap has to stay on for 20 days (!) – if Google doesn't comply, it has to pay 2.000.000,- € / day (so not half a million)

Tom, I don't mean just the ruling published on the frontpage, I also mean the court case behind it...

In section 7, it is stated that Google didn’t even bothered to collaborate to the technical commission relative to this case.
It seems that they didn’t even bothered to show up in court as mentioned in the beginning of the judgment "partie défenderesse, défaillante;" or "defendant, defaulting,".

It is stated in section 3 that "The use of Google News short-circuit many other elements such as reference to the publisher, reference to protection of copyright and reference to the authorisation or not of the use of the data, links to other sections(e.g. subject records build up by publisher, page 108 to 119 of the report)"

I think this is totally justifiable. What would you think if someone scanned your site and offered freely without acknowledging you?

And finally, you seem more concerned by the (lack of) aesthetics of this "walloping 14,342 letters" legal text (that is including white spaces) presented in the home page of google.be . It is indeed long, but just a little bit more than the 2,160 words and 13,601 characters (including white spaces) of the licence protecting your work.

Yes, the PDF (chillingeffects.org/...) is the official English version.

> What would you think if someone scanned your
> site and offered freely without acknowledging you?

But this happens to millions of sites everyday. You don't need permission to quote someone briefly, at least not by US law. And if you don't want your site to be scanned, then don't publish it on the WWW (or include a robots.txt).

> It is indeed long, but just a little bit less than
> the 2,160 words and 13,601 characters (including white
> spaces) of the licence protecting your work.

I *link* to my license and don't include it on my homepage. It would not be ridiculous if Google would've been forced to do the same – add a simple link for those who care. Of course, this is old media vs new media, and old media doesn't understand links.

> What would you think if someone scanned
> your site and offered freely without acknowledging you?

But Philipp is in EXACTLY the same situation as this Belgian newspaper. His site is in both Google and Google News. And I suppose he is perfectly happy with it. Who doesn't like free advertisement? And if he wasn't happy with it he would just use existing exclusion mechanism like robots.txt or meta tags.

With any luck this is going to backfire horribly as all the sites have been completely removed from google.be.

A ridiculoys waste of time and resources for somthing which could be fixed with a simple Disallow in the robots.txt file.

It seems this is not really about indexing, but greed and plain stupidity. Copyright is one of the biggest online problems and will continue to remain so until those in charge of courts wake up and smell the 21st century.

Funny part is: here in Belgium I haven't met anyone who cares. They all feel bad for Google. Figures.

Zalphis: I thought Google didn't participate in the case was because they didn't even find out about it until the ruling came along? I'm sure that if they had caught wind of it before, they would have defended themselves much better.

this is a shame for belgium.....
not only the ruling itselt, they are just the first now to destroy the look of the best website ever

If you read the page source, the text is all formatted (bullet points, line breaks, numbered paragraphs etc), but when viewed on the homepage, since HTML mostly ignores whitespace, the whole text bunches together and is largely unreadable.

So Google is following the letter of the ruling, in showing the text, but not presenting it in a very readable form. A couple of {pre} tags could have fixed that, so the assumption is this is deliberate – why go further than the ruling requires.

I find this worse:
http://news.google.be/

heh.

Actually I don't find the legal text on Google News nearly as jarring. I mean, no one ever scrolls all the way down, anyway. At least, it's rare for me.

Hmm, it's on Google Images Belgium too, and on web and image search results.

The belgian state is screwy in its legal provisions to someone from the US. It seems to be run by faceless governmental entities who do their best not to use common sense. They love to criticize others but hide behind governmental mazes and treat their own peoples as if no one has rights unless they are told that they do, and then tell the people about all the rights they have while they take those rights away in their practices.

The split between the french and dutch language factions leaves the french top heavy in the national politics. It shows up in rulings such as this. The french are usually SO insistent on the superiority of anything french that it makes anyone else ready to throw up on them. The french are now a minority, but a very shrill one. The dutch Flanders citizens just seem to allow the french to dictate and are too complacent to disallow it.

Uh.. sun love...
What's that crap about the "french" dictating and being "top heavy" in the national politics ? What do you know about Belgium exactly ?

Oh and by the way, ever heard of the separation of powers ?
It's a justice ruling, and has nothing to do with the government. Period.

I live there- why do you think I have the name I have?

The structure of government here is split between the federal and the parts of the country split by language groups- the french Wallonian, the dutch Flanders and a small eastern German faction. You can live in one city and the next one will have a different language and regional legal structure. If you want other information, try Wikipedia or something else.

I didn't intend to be disparaging about the people of Wallonia. It is the shrillness of insistences made in Brussels that gives them that reputation. They were once the ruling society but the Flanders economy has outpaced them and they are numerically in the minority.

If you want one perspective on Belgium, I recommend:
www.brusselsjournal.com

Sun Love, are you Paul Belien?

Google should also drop www.lesoirenligne.be which is a duplicate of Lesoir.be

http://www.google.be/search?hl=fr&q=site:www.lesoirenligne.be

Take a look at their blog:

http://66.249.93.104/translate_c?hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&langpair=fr%7Cen&u=http://blog.lesoir.be/blog-du-sel/?cat=2

-> Sunlove : nice trolling.

Best part :

"The split between the french and dutch language factions leaves the french top heavy in the national politics."

Who was the last walloon prime minister again ?

Besides, the problem of online media is not limited to belgium as you can read here :

http://www.lefigaro.fr/medias/20060920.FIG000000211_la_presse_mondiale_se_mobilise_face_a_google.html

(title : world press is up against google)

the source (in english) :

http://www.wan-press.org/article11943.html

I just have to laugh!
The newspapers want their ingresses removed from Google?
Do they not want users and hits?

A little quote:

Belgium!

Diying throes of old media.

No- I am not Mr. Belien, but I noticed today that he does have an article on this very subject on the website I referenced above. I find the writing there to be informative,truthful, and enlightening even if the so called "elitists" do consider it troubling to thier too successful efforts to monopolize the media and homogenize thought for the masses.

No- I am not trolling. I'm merely stating my observations and opinion. You are welcome to agree or disagree as you wish. I am not interested in engaging in emotional tagging.

I honestly don't see the problem with Google indexing sites. They bring more traffic to the sites! Isn't that the whole point of creating a website? So that people can go to it? http://legalnews.tv/commentary/google_belgium_waffles_on_copyright_court_20060923.html This guy makes some pretty good points too. So the court ruling is published on the Google Belgium home page now, but any Belgian press articles regarding the ruling will be nowhere to be found. I agree with the above poster that said this just makes the Belgian court look ridiculous. It's a ridiculous situation.

[Link fixed – Tony]

Our country is famous all around the world now :D

Numbers such as the 500 K compensation per day are completely unheard of in this country. The judgement therefore stinks all the way down to bank. I am completely not surprised they never got the summons half the people in Belgian court cases complain about that one.

I hear where you are coming from Sun Love.
   I just got out of court with three Belgian companies who are refusing to pay me 1000 euros!! (split between them I offered 300 euros a piece).
The Belgian judge actually thinks I am right but I am still forced to prosecute further eventhough I was practically the only one who showed up for the first hearing.

In fact I've been in a similar situation twice before and low and behold I lost both cases so I dont know why I bother. Its just a small example of how the Belgian justice system can work in a very ambigious way.

Sometimes I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact I am a foreigner. In this country people have judged me negatively for taking care of business like 'an American'. I know they will never let me win anything in this country or in any case try and make it exceedingly difficult and very expensive. But then again I'm an American in Brussels so I must be loaded and probably evading paying Belgian taxes!

My guess is they made it as difficult as possible for the summons to arrive at the right place and in the right hands.