Will Belgian papers regret their Google win?
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 26 September 2006 at 15:12
Tags: Google, Journalism
Faced with a €1m-per-day fine, Google has complied with the ruling by the Brussels Court of First Instance by removing at least 12 Belgian newspapers from its index and cache and — after some hesitation — posting the entire court order on the front page of Google.be and Google News Belgium.
Much of the web was incredulous over the court’s ruling last week that Google is violating Belgian copyright law.
To many online observers, the suit brought by Copiepresse, a group that defends the copyright of French- and German-language newspapers, it was as case of cutting off its nose to spite its face.
“By cutting themselves out of Google News, the Belgian press is only curtailing traffic to its online properties,” wrote Benjamin Lehmann, an analyst at Jupiter Research.
Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch argued that the lawsuits were unnecessary and offered this advice to the Belgian newspapers: “Just opt-out. If you’re worth it, Google and the others will come running to the negotiating table. If you’re not, well, no one’s going to miss you — but you’ll miss the search engine traffic, as the Belgian publications almost certainly are discovering to their horror now. ”
But US online newspaper consultant Steve Yelvington defended Copiepresse’s logic in filing the suit. Contrary to conventional online wisdom, Yelvington argued, the traffic to news web sites generated by Google is not always a good thing. Unqualified visitors from all over the world are of no use business models that depend upon delivering local audiences to local advertisers.
The real issue in the Belgian case, according to Yelvington, is not Google’s activities as a search engine, but its activities as a publisher, particularly of cached versions of web sites once they have been taken offline by their publisher.
“There is a line between fair use and thievery, and it is not Google’s to define through unilateral action,” he argued.
Tags: Google, Journalism
