Belgian Appeals Court Says Google Must Pay Up For Linking To Newspaper Websites
from the linking-is-infringing dept
The insanity continues. You may recall that, five years ago, a bunch of French- and German-language newspapers in Belgium, represented by the organization Copiepresse, claimed that Google was infringing on their copyrights by linking to newspaper stories. The fact that they could have blocked Google if they wanted to didn't seem to matter. They just thought Google should pay up for sending them traffic, and amazingly, a court agreed. The case has gone on for years, with Copiepresse demanding a ton of cash. The latest is that -- astoundingly -- a Belgian appeals court has agreed with Copiepresse, and said that merely linking to these newspaper websites is infringement.I guess this means we can no longer link to any website in Belgium.
In the meantime, Google has been ordered to remove any and all links to articles and photos from all Belgian newspapers (in German or French -- as the article notes, the Flemish papers have no apparent problem with Google News). Google execs seem understandably bewildered by the decision. First of all, they're sending these newspapers traffic, which you would think is a good thing. Second, for the most part (with a few notable exceptions) courts have found that merely linking is not infringement. And, most importantly, if these newspapers don't want Google linking to them, all they have to do is set up a robots.txt file telling Google to go elsewhere.
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Filed Under: belgium, copyright, linking, newspapers
Companies: google
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newsPAPER
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Re: newsPAPER
If linking to a Belgian Newspaper is infringement, then isn't any linking to any website in Belgium just as infringing?
Perhaps the entire country should go Googledark...
CBMHB
I
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...oh...suddenly it all makes sense, it's some jerks idea of a business model!
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After the Fact...
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A Belgian judge once cancelled his trip to the UK. When asked why, he said he considered it too dangerous to drive in a country where they drive on the left side of the road. When they told him that it's not as bad as he thinks, he replied: "Well, I've tried to drive on the left side in Brussels but I didn't like it..."
Oh, well... I guess there will be some more jokes about Belgians from now on. And possibly other nationalities will start to make fun of them because of this decision...
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It's hilarious*.
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What? Why aren't you laughing? I guess you had to be there.
* It's funny because it's true and, as we all know, true implies funny. Like those videos of people that fall off stairs.
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Indeed. Now we know why "Belgium" is the worst word ever.
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I'm sure eventually Copiepresse will get fed up replying to people asking why they are so stupid, who knows, maybe they will even see the errors of their ways.
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Google's search engine believes this link is relevant to your search request, but the owner of the page, Copiepresse doesn't want you to be able to find this page.
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Sure, Google can send that message to U.S. citizens with no problems, but if it sends it to citizens in countries without similar free speech rights it could still get sued and lose.
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> citizens with no problems, but if it sends
> it to citizens in countries without similar
> free speech rights it could still get sued
> and lose.
Sued for what? Explaining to their customers that they're abiding by a valid Belgian court order?
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I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to explain this to their customers, I think that it makes sense that they should, I'm just saying that you're assuming that they have a legal system that makes sense. As the OP demonstrates, they clearly do not.
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I can only think of two possibilities:
1) They have rubbish paywalls and people can bypass them through a Google search.
2) They think that by doing this people will be forced to travel to the newspaper website directly in order to get their Belgian news.
Neither of which is a particularly appealing option.
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Re: Call me Al
What they want is for Google to continue to send them traffic, and to send them money...
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You shouldn't be allowed to force someone to both provide you with a service and to pay you for providing you that service.
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Robots.txt is a relatively simple text file that the site owner can use to tell Google or other text crawlers not to index the website. It can also be used to tell web crawlers how to optimally crawl the site. It is a well known technique among site administrators. It has been around since the earliest days of the web.
When newspapers complain about Google indexing their website it is usually entertaining to look at their robots.text file because it is almost always set up to tell Google explicitly how to index their site.
Generally you can look at the file by just appending /robots.txt to the end of the URL.
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One wonders if Belgium is all for ACTA, or if they recently had some laws proposed and paid for by the US Government.
It is amazing the lengths every type on industry seems willing to go through to try to stave off any possibility of technology forcing them to adapt.
But when you can just try to extract money from someone with deep pockets and the courts let you... why not?
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Belgium
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Re: Belgium
Planet Belgium, apparently, which must be made entirely of chocolate and obtuse rent-seekers.
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Boy are they going to be sorry...
Tech: Okay, go to facebook.com
User: *opens Google, searches for Facebook*
Tech: What are you doing?
User: Going to Facebook like you told me.
Tech: Why not just type in the address?
User: This is how I always do it.....
Tech: *headslap*
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Re: Boy are they going to be sorry...
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/headdesk
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Re: Boy are they going to be sorry...
I still type 'aicn' into google, rather than typing 'aintitcool.com' into the addressbar, for instance. It's just faster, and I hate going into the bookmarks menu.
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None
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To quote Zaphod...
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"A Belgian walks into a bar and says...."
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There; fixed it for them.
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~someone out in the ether
and dont forget, monty python had a few things to say about the belgians
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Screw the Belgian newspapers...
As long as Belgium keeps exporting their beers, I'm ok with their newspapers withering away.
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Reading the judgment....
While Belgium probably has a copyright exception for reporting current events (I think it's in EU law), keeping a cache of paid-for news articles for a month was found to go too far.
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Re: Reading the judgment....
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money
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google..
The newspapers are unclear on the concept. Without google, their traffic would drop a lot.
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Awesome!
1. Go to Belgium. (Not strictly necessary, but makes life simpler in the long run.)
2. Start up web site/blog.
3. Write stories criticizing Belgian courts and businesses.
4. When these places link to you, sue them for copyright infringement.
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They Do Not Know How To Use The ...
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If I ran a minor newspaper in Belgium...
I bet you could beat out the majors and become the go-to news website in Belgium.
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