Google Settles Part Of Belgian Lawsuit -- Many Questions Left Unanswered
from the keeping-quiet dept
On Friday, Google was back in court fighting the ridiculous ruling written by a judge that confused Google and Google News (repeatedly referring to Google's cache as if it were a part of Google News, when it is not) which banned Google from linking to French and German language Belgian newspaper websites. Following all the publicity from the case, some others, such as Belgian photographers jumped on the bandwagon asking Google not to send them traffic. However, over the weekend, the news broke that Google has settled with two of the five groups that were suing it -- but the details are left out. That has many people speculating over whether or not Google paid up. Alternatively, it's possible that someone from Google sat these people down, explained to them how the internet works, and why it's a damn good thing when the world's most popular search engine is driving lots of traffic your way (or perhaps, they just pointed out how damaging it is for Google to stop linking to them). However, if it does later come out that Google somehow paid up to settle this dispute, it will open them up to tremendous problems, as publishers of all types will suddenly start demanding their cut as well. The folks at Google know all of this, so it would be quite a surprise if they did pay up.
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Should they not be clear about this then?
I'm next in line, thank you!
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As me, Google should have just delisted Belgium...
Bingo. Effective removal of one troublesome small country from all future interferences with Google's business.
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Re: As me, Google should have just delisted Belgiu
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The scary part to me, is the trend, maybe its in google's best interest to pay them. That way no search start up will ever have a proper index of sites as they will have to pay for some of them.
They should have held the line and pulled everything from the index and watched them suffer.
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Why?
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Stupid motto
"Do no evil, and suffer no fool"
sarcasm
These people eat waffles as dessert and clearly cannot be trusted with the Internet.
/sarcasm
Seems to me that Google is doing all the work to make the Internet more useful and adding content and everyone can only think in get-paid-now terms. Perhaps that's understandable, but Google is building a better road to your site so shouldn't you be building a better site?
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robots.txt
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Re: robots.txt
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now this is true capitalism
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Belgian SCAM. Seriously.
Yes, ICT industry execs, invest in Belgium, where you'll find your trusty collective copyright management contact at www.scam.be
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