Comments on: Google suffers setback in copyright case

Belgian court says newspaper excerpts are a no-no. But experts question whether there will be much of an impact outside Europe.

[extinctone]

So what's the problem?

The copyright holder should be able to control how the content is used. And Google is free to set the terms under which it will index a site. If they can't agree, exclude the site from the Google search.

[t8]

Yes

Yes it would be foolish to exclude yourself from Google's index and it would hurt those excluded much more than Google.

But Google's mission is to organise all the worlds information and excluding information or having to ask permission to content owners for indexing would seriously impeded that vision.

[mrjam32]

The problem is...

The problem is that if Google is not generating the traffic, then the following happens:

(1) The traffic goes directly to the source without the use of a search engine, reducing potential revenue.
(2) Google loses another avenue for tracking certain users (which really is related to #1)

Google always wants you to use them versus something else. If nothing else, you help them generate a huge database of information used to target potential customers (ads).

[Renegade Knight]

Alternatly

Google can display directly a "Window" to the copyrighted content. Google is off the hooks because the copyright holders are displaying for the world to see their content just as they are allready doing.

Functionally I can't tell the difference. But google by not directly providing the info and instead providing a "net window" that lets you see it is no longer "infringing".

Not that making their materials easier to find really violates the spirit of copyrights.

[kdrobb2k]

Cutting their own throats

Sites I never knew existed have been discovered via Google News. Let the newly discovered reap the exposure and ad revenue. Let the "copyright crybabies" sit unnoticed as Google and others link us with new sources of information.

[JadedGamer]

Portal dominance

Yes; as Google climbs in its "portal market share", telling Google not to map your site will be like telling a developer not to port a program to Windows...

[sirpeter]

Xenophobic

Ah zee Americaans! Zey theenk zey can make zee monee from our 'ard work, uh? Eet does not matter if zey are 'elping us get more of zee beezness also - vee just vant them to go avay! Just leave us vith our veird language 'nd veirder accents!

[hadaso]

The problem is the Berne convention treaty

The Berne convention treaty requires that copyrights are automatic and practically nothing is allowed without the copyright holder explicitly agreeing. This is incompatible with how things are done on the web, including the way those that are suing Google are behaving: first they make their content freely available on the web and publicise that their content is abvailable. That means that implicitly they are allowing use of their content. Later they choose to go to court and claim that they did not allow certain uses explicitly. To know what they allow and what they do not allow you need to wait till they sue you.

So what really should be changed is the berne convention treaty and copyright should not be implicit (and if it is it should not require explicit consent when imlicit consent was given). And until this is changed, there's a problem. Google can decide to not catalog what the author has not explicitly allowed, but this is incompatible with Google's mission, so they cannot do it right now.

However I think that they should be gradually moving to a model that is very restrictive on content whose cataloging is not explicitly allowed by the copyright owner. There should be some mechanism along the Creative Commons model that would allow a copyright owner to specify how Content can be cataloged, whether cached copies are made available etc. that content owners can easily use to sprcify how they want their content cataloged, and then Google can gradually move to giving precedence to content that has higher availability to the user. That would eventually make content owners that actually want users to get to their content decide on exactly what they want to allow and what they do not want to allow. They would have to choose if they want to receive free publicity using serach engines and information aggregation services or they want to keep their contents out of these and do their self promotion in other ways.

[hadaso]

Copyright or "copy-burden"

I replying my own post to add a thougt:

The way copyright laws work now is that they remove the burden of registering content by the "owner" and they create the burden of having to seek explicit permission for use of the content.

While perhaps these laws are not going to change soon since there are powerful organization that benefit from this way of doing things, the Code (in the sense of Lessig) that runs the web can be made to work in a way that that makes the need to give an explicit permision for each single use of content into a burden on copyright holders (a burden that can be minimized by explicitly providing general use licences like the Creative Commons model).

That is, since the need to obtain explicit licenses for each use is incompatible with the way the web works now, its code should be used to create incentives for content providers to publicise their permissions in advance instead of retroactively through law suits.

[rjakobson]

The Problem Is ...

The concept that a work on the Internet is freely available is hardly implied. Further - the actual copyrights provided by web use are on the newservices web sites. It is not a in order to discover what rights are given freely you have to wait to be sued situation at all.

It is a situation where Google - for whatever reason (automatic cataloging, etc) does not bother to read and peruse these rights - and then take them into account when crawling the web and then providing the content they've captured.

We seem to assume that Google is a free service - which is erroneous. It's free to we - the people who use the service as searchers - but it's paid for similar to how TV and Radio were before we all were on cable and satelite. It was free in the sense anyone who had a radio could use it. But the music played on it - was never meant, implied or otherwise meant to be recorded and used as the user wished. I could not - record a song I heard on another radio station, then play it on my own.

This is a commonly understood area of copyright law. Google - and much of the internet world - simply wants to pretend it's reuse of a recorded material from the Internet is not the same thing.

[wsdowns]

Naive Euro-Publishers are Missing the Boat

In the old days media giants like CNN used to play cat and mouse games with people who would link to their content (yep, you read that right). They would change the content locations every few hours so that various websites across the net would not be able to claim CNN content as their own. Then, one day, these big companies woke up and realized that there was no harm in having others link to their content. In fact, this was a practice to be encouraged - and with new mechanisms like RSS it was the best way to drive MASSIVE TRAFFIC.

These content "owners" deserve what they get - when websites across the planet remove all the links to Belgian content maybe they'll begin to understand what the web is all about...

What's next, if I "quote" or "paraphrase" a news story I read is that legal?

[joebuff75]

some newspapers not in line

I reckon some of the french-speaking newspapers in Belgium
are not in line with Copiepresse.

Go to Google.be and search for "sudpresse" which displays a
page containing logos for certain newspapers.

When you search Google.be for individual sites listed on
Sudpresse, you see that those sites are being blocked: "In
response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have
removed 8 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read
more about the request at ChillingEffects.org."

So I guess the webmasters are still trying to get traffic from
Google using doorway pages, although their management sits in
the same boat as CopiePresse...

Strangely, "copiepresse.be" is also still listed in Google's index...

[Lord Paul]

More Room for People that want the exposure

How silly Google gives them free exposure and they're complaining. I think Google should remove them from the search results so there's more room for the websites that want to be seen.

[jevenew]

Newspaper articles

Does this mean that your German/French/Belgium gramma can't send you a news clipping? What a crock. This copyright crap is getting out of hand. Just like the dark ages, when the only ones who knew anything were the ones who had the books. If you, as a creative genius, do not want anyone seeing your precious article, keep it to yourself.

[extinctone]

I think it's really funny...

that so many of the posters here seem to think that the complainants in this case haven't considered the benefit of have having their sites indexed. I'm sure they're measuring their site traffic, along with the referring URLs, and they're well aware of the impact of loss of traffic from Google. I also think it's really funny that this immediately becomes a nationalistic issue for Americans. For a nation with such a diverse immigration background, it's amazing how hostile we are to virtually every country in the world.

[brian.lee]

Both parties stupid

Once something like this is set in stone (made law) it's very hard to undo. Google and media companies should have settled this out of court, I suspect the all mighty Google probably flipped them the bird originally when media outlets complained. Perhaps due to an inflated ego "Google is King"

[Steve Imparl]

Re: Both parties stupid

That's a serious problem. An out-of-court settlement would have been better here because it would not have prejudiced future outcomes.

It is helpful to remember that not everyone who wants to protect their copyright is an anti-technology Luddite, a retainer of big media corporations, or an anti-Google malcontent. There are arguments on both sides of the issue. We need to learn to listen better to others' concerns so that we can develop solutions that will work for the highest good of all concerned.