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Are Search Engine Spiders Infringing on Copyright? Belgium
Speaks Out
By Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc.
September 20, 2006
» Click here for  PDF &  Word Versions
Last Friday (Sept 15th) a Belgium court dealt a stunning blow
against Google and its Google News search service. The court
is now forbidding the popular search engine from indexing Belgian
newspaper content without paying each newspaper for the use
of their content.
The ruling requires Google to remove the plaintiff’s
newspaper content from its search engine database within 10
days or face threatened fines of 1,000,000- € per day.
In addition, Google must publish “in a visible and clear
manner and without any commentary from her part the entire intervening
judgment on the home pages of ‘google.be’ and of ‘news.google.be’ for
a continuous period of 5 days within 10 days… under penalty
of a daily fine of 500,000- € per day of delay.” (source website and original
legal document)
This ruling signifies a strong precedent for other newspapers
to follow and ultimately brings up a tempting legal option for
all of those sue-happy “people” out there; “if
my site is copyrighted… can I sue Google for indexing
it?” The fact is newspapers with an online presence are
bound to jump in on the action and try to get a little financial
love from the major search engines and precedent like this just
urges them on. Danny Sullivan published an extremely informative
article today where he describes his interview with the Belgian
group that led this successful case against Google. In this
article he notes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut to the chase
and sensibly summarized this legal nightmare as “business
negotiation being done in a courtroom.” I must agree because
there is no question the path news companies are taking to get
their needs met is ass-backwards.
Just consider the following:
1. Google drove traffic to Belgian news sites ultimately making
these sites money; their advertisers got more visibility and
they got more subscribers.
2. Belgian news sites took Google to court to have their copyrighted
material removed because they felt Google should not be able
to use it without paying for it.
3. By winning their case Belgian news sites have now been removed
from Google and ultimately the news sites will lose money by
their online exposure being severely decreased.
To put this in another perspective if this was your business;
would you spend money to go to court with the ultimate goal
of losing money by losing online presence in the hopes that
Google will pay you to get your content back later? Seems like
a silly gamble to me and based entirely on the pursuit of ego.
The simple fact is that newspapers make money by getting free
exposure from search giants like Google. Now they are biting
the hand that feeds them. In that vein, the World Association
of Newspapers (WAN) is taking a different, more sensible step
to locate a technological solution to the problem without going
immediately to court. Based in Paris, WAN represents 18,000
newspapers from around the world. According to WAN, two options
have been considered at this early juncture:
1. Pay Royalties: search engines that pay an essential royalty
will then be allowed to present copyrighted content within
their search engine results for a limited time. If they don’t
pay then the content will be blocked and this must be respected
by the search engines as a whole.
2. New Robot Limiting Capabilities: the search engines need
to acknowledge and follow an instructive file that could be
provided by news sites which would define limits for the use
of copyrighted information on their site.
How serious is WAN? Apparently a number of WAN members have
separately launched legal proceedings against Google over the “Napsterisation” (illegal
use) of stories on its website.
Here is a January 31st article discussing this issue: Newspaper,
Magazine and Book Publisher Organizations to Address Search
Engine Practices.
My Take
Google has been paying the Associated Press (AP) for content
for a while now under the reasoning that Google expects to
use AP content within a new Google News offering later this
year. Other news companies see this paid arrangement as additional
precedent that Google should be paying for their content.
At this time WAN as a whole has not legally moved against
the major search engines for infringement but has decided
to try and find a solution amenable to both the search engines
and WAN. I believe the search engines are smart enough to
know that finding some middle ground is worth their time.
I expect that between the two industries a solution such
as new WAN-approved licensing Meta tags or robots.txt tags added
over the next year to tackle the use and expiration of copyrighted
content.
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