Google relents, publishes Belgian court ruling

The decision is a reversal from its previous refusal to comply with the court's order.

The story "Google relents, publishes Belgian court ruling" published September 23, 2006 at 4:02 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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[hadaso]

publishers should comply with internet standards

publishers should comply with internet standards. Whan a publisher uses internet protocols to serve content, there are implications. Internet standards define what to do with the material. Http headers misght define a timeframe for caching the file that the publisher's webserver sends to Google's client (googlebot) and that is an explicit permision by the copyright holder to do just that.

There are also convention in the network. There are ways to setup a website. If a website holder wishes to disallow googlebot from indexing parts of the website, the sebsite owners tells googlebot just this in the standard way: using a robots.txt file to define what is indexable by which bot. They may also configure their web server not to respond to googlebot requests by sending the copyrighted materials. What happens when googlebot approaches a website is that googlebot first asks if there are any published restrictions on indexing by requesting those (requesting the robots.txt file). Then if there are no restrictions googlebot identifies itself as googlebot and politely asks the webserver to "please send the content of this file to this port of mine" using the http language (protocol). Finaly, if the webserver was configured to respond positively to googlebot's requests then it sends the content with http headers describing how it should be treated in a format that the webserver operator has agreed to coply to by using the protocol. All this constitutes explicit permision for Google to use the copyrighted material in certain limited ways.

If those publishers do not wish to give those permisions, they should not do so. No one forces them to use the web. If they want to they should understand what they are doing.

[pcpimpster]

100 % Correct and Well Explained

I find it hilarious google or any other company can even be sued for adding value to the web sites it links to for no cost to the host.

Maybe these "news" orgs should just stick to selling their warez on paper. I would hope they have a better understanding of that ancient form for peddling their crap headlines.

Eww my fingers are black.