   Google vs Belgian courts
  Hopefully, this is not a repost...For those of you unaware, Google have been in the midst of a court battle for providing links to belgian newspapers in their news section.  A summary of what has happened thus far can be found on CNN. A more thorough explanation can be found on various news sites.In essence, Google lost the court battle and have been ordered to display the ruling on their Belgian homepage (which they HAD refused).  Google have now finally given in and posted the court ruling on their regional homepage site for Belguim.I find this to be over the top.  I can see where the Belgian courts are coming from, but Google has removed any links to belgian newspapers and any summaries.  Who do you think is worst off?  Plainly, I think Google has made the Belgian court system look "stupid".  What are your thoughts?GCS584   
  I'm angry at what the court of my own country did. It feels like they're fighting against technology and freedom.That, and the fact that it's all in French. Belgium has the Dutch and the French speaking part, and this all appears to have to do with the French part. Yet we Flemish people have to see this huge ugly French text in the Dutch version of google.be:This Dutch-French(and German) thing is a very, very sensitive matter in Belgian politics, maybe some smart Flemish people can work something out to "troublify" the case by saying something about the fact that this French text is visible for all language regions :)Pretty much everyone of Belgium who uses the internet will have immediatly seen this thing and probably many of them have been wondering what the heck they've been doing in Brussels and formed an opinion about the court.   ;  I agree with google. The amount of text reproduced from those articles is miniscule. Placement at google news brings traffic to those sites making Copiepresse the ultimate loser here. ;  When reading this you start to consider if all search engines might be illegal. Searching with Google on the Internet shows summaries from the websites. It might also link to illegal content. This sounds pretty much as a possible breach of copyright :P.Is the issue perhaps that people care more about copyright today than they used to? In a way it is a bit weird that search engines that index new sites automatically are allowed(as they reproduce copyrighted material). Google's caching feature seems to store an entire copy of *copyrighted* text. That doesn't sound legal at all as Google probably doesn't have the copyright holder's permission to make copies of the copyrighted pages...I haven't thought about this before I read this thread :-). Maybe search engines ARE doing something illegal?;  I don't agree with this, and I take that further and don't agree with the notion of hotlinking as "bandwidth theft". If you make some data completely freely available, you can't reasonably complain when people - or automated agents - actually, you know, *obtain* it. Publishing on the web and trying to assert copyright isn't like writing a book and trying to assert copyright; it's more like walking around downtown with a sandwich board upon which your first draft is inscribed, and trying to assert copyright. Just doesn't work.   ;  I personally like to think of services like Google in the same way I think of a web browser. Various people publish information publicly on their websites, and Google helps me to locate that information in much the same way Internet Explorer does.You don't see people suing the makers of FireFox or whatever for having ad-blocking functionality in their browser, do you?Anyway - I think this has already been posted (at least, I have ready it elsewhere). I seem to recall that Google did not hear about the case until two weeks after a ruling had been made (what was that about stupid Belgian courts?)It's obviously easier for Google to just comply, than to try and fight it.   ;  So to make it more clear, they sued an indexing service for indexing. Right?Someone should explain them theirs rights, and ask them to pay for trial costs, and costs from waste of money consumed by this trial. This behavior certainly doesn't violate copyright law, and fines of 500.000 (1.000.000) per day are rather crazy, even MS received just a few millions per day (Actually it was also bit silly they did precisely what they were asked for).It seems this resolution violated some fair use rights, like an ability to copy a few lines from a text without its author permission.It prety much might be a disaster for all journalists. What? I was sued for citation? ~_^We should pity citeseer and all abstract services, this ruling could be disaster for them. At least users would have reason to copy full articles without any restrains.It might be interesting if the indexing service would be unavailable for Belgium. I wonder how quickly would scientists violate the law and masquerade themselves to look like they are not live in Belgium.[Edited by - Raghar on September 24, 2006 11:40:30 AM];  This reminds me of a favorite quote of mine:"Who wants to be the first to sound like an out of touch jackass?" - John StewartReally though, the courts are so flawed when it comes to modern technology it doesn't surprise me that this happened.   ;  Well, I do believe that any company should have the right to not be indexed by search engines if they ask not to be.  (Did they have a robots.txt ?)However, I can't find any info on wether they asked Google before suing them.  If they did, then Google should've complied and power to them.  If they didn't, the whole thing is kind of dumb really.  The European really seem pissed at the defacto control of the consumer tech industry by American corporations.  It seems to me as if it is a submarine strike at the Google in the same way they tried to address Microsoft's (Windows N sold what, 6 copies ?) and Apple respectives 'monopolies'.   