Google News Removes Belgian Newspaper

CaVi writes "Following a judicial action (link in French) by the 'French-speaking Belgian Association of the press,' Google.be has removed all the French-speaking press sites from its index, as can be seen by doing a search. The court order to Google is posted at Chilling Effects. In summary, the editors want a cut of the profit that Google News makes using their information. No such deal exists for the moment. Google has been ordered to remove all references, or pay one million Euros per day if it doesn't comply. Net effect: they removed all link to the sites, from Google News, but also from Google's search. Will Google become irrelevant in Belgian, and be replaced by MSN? Or will the newspapers, which gain from commercials, and thus net traffic, change their position when they'll see the drop in traffic that it is causing?" There's also a link to a Dutch news article on the subject; one of the key issues was evidently that some of what Google was carrying was no longer available on the newspaper's website itself, so rather then linking to the newspaper, Google was displaying it on their own.

Don't worry its Belgium

[MosesJones]

As the old challenge goes, name 10 famous Belgians. Nice country and all but not exactly news central. In effect this is like Des Moines doing the same, and not even people in Des Moines would mind if they just had OTHER peoples news.

Maybe its the start of something, all really dull places will sue to have their very dull news removed. After all, if something interesting happens there then one of the majors will cover it.

$1m a day... nice sense of perspective.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

[TheAngryMob]

There's no such thing as a language called 'Belgian.'

They speak Dutch (Flemish), French, and German.

I sometimes wonder about the average /.er's grasp on geography AND foreign languages.

Re:Block IPs?

[h00pla]

Nah. The newspaper's webmaster should just learn how to use the 'NOCACHE,NOARCHIVE' tag.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

[kfg]

Belgians do not speak Belgian. They speak either French or a dialect of Dutch known as Flemish.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1604253, 00.html [timesonline.co.uk]

KFG

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy:

Erasmus, Descartes, Brueghel, Van Dyck, Georges Lemaître, Henry Spaack, Karel V, Mercator, Jacques Brel, Sax, Django Reinhardt, Jansenss (farmaceutica), Damiaan ...

I know, all from the past. I'm quite sure that 100 years from now lots of present Belgians will be known. Belgium is the European epicentre for science, politics and art.

Hey, it's not my fault you don't know any history.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

[Ford Prefect]

By the way - I'm assuming the submitter meant "Will Google become irrelevent in Belgium" not the entire language, though the average /.er's grasp on geography makes me wonder sometimes.

Belgium is a country with three official languages and three main regions - the Flemish-speaking Flanders (6 million people), the French-speaking Wallonia (3.3 million people) and the mostly-French-speaking, officially-bilingual capital Brussels (1 million people). Plus to add to the fun, there are 70,000 German-speakers in the east of the country.

There are some pretty harsh rivalries between the currently-financially-stable Flanders and the recession-hit Wallonia - it's impressive that the country hasn't split apart already. The situation is ... complicated, politically.

But then Belgium's really dull and nothing happens here, right? I know otherwise, because I live here.

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

[teslar]

As the old challenge goes, name 10 famous Belgians.

Amélie Nothomb
Hergé
Jacky Ickx
Charles the Great
Adolphe Sax
Lara Fabian
Jacques Brel
Raymond Devos
Cécile de France
Helmut Lotti

That's on top of my head (and no, I am not Belgian)
Just because you don't know any doesn't any doesn't mean they don't exist :) Why do people always call places they have no clue about 'dull'?

RTF ruling

[LordEd]

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- per day of delay;

All sites, not just news. It seems that the news site wants to punish itself.

The problem is Google Cache, I think

[reynaert]

If I understand this correctly, the principal problem is not Google News but rather Google Cache. It seems that when news articles move from public to subscriber-only, Google retrieved the contents from its cache, instead of removing the article. So the issue was that Google was distributing articles instead of only linking them.

Re:Can we get some editing here please?

[ZeroExistenZ]

The problem was that the newssite of French and German speaking Belgium had articles indexed by google (I believe it's about Le Soir [lesoir.be]), and that didn't pose any problem.

They changed the way the articles were accessible and made a "pay to view"-service, yet google had cached the newsarticles offering them "for free" (as the previously were offered publicly for free)

The problem for them was in how Google had a cache of something that wasn't free anymore, violating their copyright.

The link to the article on vrtnieuws [vrtnieuws.net] as a Belgian newssite is misleading as vrtnieuws is a Flemish (Dutch speaking) newssite. In the audio fragment the interviewer wonders wherever it's not "good publicity" to have google link to your content and the specialist agrees with that how newssites "like" that, but explains the articles didn't link back to the website to the updated or removed content which posed the problem: their content being cached, freely accessable when they charged for it, and no link back to their webpage.

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

[Anonymous Coward]

René Magritte
Victor Horta
Eddy Merckx
Kim Clijsters
Justine Hénin
Jean-Claude Van Damme (if Lotti counts, he does too :)

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

[big ben bullet]

well, i'm not the first to give you a list... but these just have to be mentioned

- adolph sax
- toots tielemans
- django reinhardt
- jean claude van damme (hmmm... i know i know... you said 'famous' not 'great')
- anouck lepeire
- kim clijsters
- justine henin - ardenne
- audrey hepburn
- rene magritte (ceci n'est pas ...)
- peter paul rubens

GASP!!!

[Plutonite]

You mean I can't read earth-shattering news exclusively put on french-speaking, .be domains anymore? Whatever will we do now? Dear Jesus.. how will I survive when such a huge part of the internets has been torn away? How many tubes are left, oh harsh harsh world?

In all seriousness, I didn't know the french-speaking press of the Belgian world was so damn stupid. Most of their traffic probably comes from people accidentally clicking on links from google. Why would they do this? Money?

That's like kidnapping Dubya in Egypt and asking the Arabs for a ransom.

Re:How important is French to the Belgians?

[CaVi]

Actually, I submitted the story, previewed it, to only discover later that I typed 'Belgian' instead of 'Belgium'. Sorry for the confusion. Sorry also if the text was not clear. Wouldn't it be good if there were any editors at Slashdot to correct obvious mistakes? ;) And yes, I'm not a native english speaker. Thanks for defending me!

Re:Don't worry its Belgium

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Hmm, you have a very different perspective than I. I've always viewed Belgium as one of those countries with disproportionate influence. As the location for the NATO headquarters, they've always been sort of representative of Europe, and now with the headquarters of the EU there as well, it is semi-official.

The original headquarters of NATO was Paris, but it was moved to Brussels after DeGaulle began to withdraw French forces from the NATO command structure to spite the US and UK. This is only a guess, but I have always assumed that Brussels was selected as the headquarters of the EU because of its central location (well, at least in relation to the original members), a history of multilingualism and the fact that having the headquarters there was much less likely to cause resentment than putting it in the UK, France or Germany.

The court documents reveals some interesting thing

[Mystra007]

Apparently, they have ordered these large fines thanks to the attitude of Google.

For example, google wasn't present in court and they didn't collaborate at all in the investigation.

So the newspapers won by default. Google "indifferent" attitude apparently annoyed the court, so they basically granted the demands of the newspaper.

For some reason that part isn't translated in the english version of the court document, but here it is (in French - quoted from the court documents) and a rough translation, done by myself, follows each quotes:

1."Attendu que le tribunal de céans ne manque pas d'être
surpris par l'attitude de la défenderesse qui n'a pas jugé utile
de participer à' la mission d'expertise, malgré les invitations
qui lui avaient été adressées par l'expert judiciaire, et qui ne
comparaît pas ;"
Translation:
The court is surprised by the attitude of the defendant which hasn't
found useful to participate in the expert evaluation[...]and who
aren't present in court.

2."Attendu que cette attitude constitue une indication de ce que
les craintes que nourrit la demanderesse sur la mauvaise
volontk que mettra à la d4fenderesse à s'exécuter pourraient
être fondées ;"
Translation:
This attitude is an indication that the fears of the plaintiff
about the bad faith of the defendant might be justified.

3."Que l'attitude de la défenderesse est d'autant plus
surprenante que dans d'autres pays, cettes plus importants
que la Belgique, la défenderesse s'est engagée dans des
négociations avec les 4diteurs de journaux pour résoudre la
question du respect des droits d'auteur ;"
Translation:
That the attitude of the defendant is more so surprising
that in other countries, certainly bigger than Belgium,
the defendant had been negociating with newspapers editors to
solves the copyrights and intellectual properties issues.

Also, the court order isn't just about the Soir Libre newspaper, but about all newspapers editors, journalists, etc represented by cafepresse.

Belgium vs Google : some accurate info

[Dretio from Belgium]

First of all : it is pretty complex to explain our Belgian laws to you.. but I'll try! If you read the complete text there are several important points : - first of all Google wasn't in the courtroom to defend themselves, this leaves a whole procedure open for them to react. (but do they care?) - your robot.txt makes no sense here, that's an opt-out. In Belgium everything has to be opt-in. - all newspapers are strong entities in Belgium, nobody searches them in Google, everyone just types the newspaper name, followed by .be - the main argument was brought to the judge by a court expert. They did some tests by removing articles on some newspaper websites (for example : wrong info, re-edited articles) but Google News would still show them. This is a major issue here. You have to know we have a special database law (1992) in Belgium. This law prohibits the commercial use, non-commercial transaction of databases between entities and.. the creation of a database (whatever data) without the explicit knowledge of those who are "databased".. For the judge it was clear that Google made a "database" of the articles - so case closed. (although i think "google cache" is not the same as "a database") As a Belgian I'm proud we have the strongest privacy laws in the world (really, study them..), but the database law is now used in a copyright infringement suit. (where in the past, it was mainly used to protect individuals) Besides of all these things : we still are slammed with arguments like "google making money with the news". But everyone can see there are no ads on news.google.be For your info : the flemish part of the belgian newspapers just asked Google not to be indexed, and Google had no problem with that. In my opinion and after reading the verdict several times, Google would win the case with just a 0 sec. cache

Re:The problem is Google Cache, I think

[MikeBabcock]

This is in no way Google's fault. Google caches sites, the Internet archive [archive.org] caches sites, its up to you as a webmaster to put limits on it with the well-publicized "robots.txt" restrictions available to you.

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

[tommertron]

caches those pages and offers them for free with their own ads added

First of all, Google News doesn't have ANY ads, mainly because of concerns over copyright that you mentioned. Secondly, Google Web Search only displays its ads in its search listings, NOT when you view the cached page. And most competent webmasters know that if they don't want their content cached by Google, they can just edit their robots.txt file to exclude themselves from being cached, or even indexed.

I just can't understand why news sites don't want to be on Google News. I've gone to news sites (and hence seen that news site's ads)that I never would have otherwise gone to unless I'd browsed Google News. Why aren't the news sites happy for the free exposure?

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

[glesga_kiss]

but it seems to me that here in the USA and most other similar countries (e.g. UK), anything that's out in a public place (outdoor sculptures, buildings, etc.) can be photographed as much as you like.

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but this has definitely happened in Chicago [boingboing.net]

Re:The problem is Google Cache, I think

[MikeBabcock]

You probably want to read Google's Guide for Webmasters [google.com] and the Robots Exclusion [robotstxt.org] guides.

In my experience, Google no longer caches websites that haven't been indexable in some time. That is to say, if you remove the page or even better -- replace it with an empty one that links to an excluded page, Google should (and most likely will) remove the cache of the originally indexed page. I'd expect this to happen within a month or so (from my experience).

No guarantees.

Re:Let's play BREAK THE INTERNET!

[pjt33]

When it comes to copyright that's not entirely true because of the reciprocity aspects of the Berne Convention.