Belgian Newspapers sue Google for having their headlines and excerpts appear on Google News.  This only helps Bengian Newspapers and brings them traffic.

Why is Belgian Newspapers suing Google?

Not because Google is scraping their content (which Google is and all social network sites are to some point), but because Google is so big and has so much money, why not?

The whole point goes back to how Google was built.  Google runs on a web-spider, or a content “scraper” in essense.  Now, this is this a bad thing?  No, they do in return give you great traffic back to the sites that are indexed on Google search.

That’s how all search engines work but companies can legally sue for copyright infringement damages and win as we have seen in the past.

Google’s search engine and web spiders does lie on the verge of “copyright infrigement” even if the website owner has a choice to put a “robot.txt” file to let Google know that they don’t want to be “spidered”.

The default for all search engines should ‘not’ spider sites unless specifically told by the website owners.

But then, we wouldn’t have a great search engine to use and a search engine that’d find the latest information for you.  That would just REALLY suck.

Will this affect Google?

Oh, hell no, they are way too big.   If companies started suing when Google was just starting out, there may be no Google today.  But as it turns out, this incident is probably going to be just a speck of dirt.

The real question here is: when will Copiepresse and the newspapers and magazines that comprise it all go bankrupt when they realize that they can’t sell enough ads in printed issues anymore and they don’t have enough traffic to sell ads in online versions, either? Maybe it’s already happening, and maybe that’s why they’re pretending they don’t understand what Internet is and how it works, so they decided to take the easy route and grab some quick cash while the judges can still be persuaded to vote in their favor in a case like this.

via mashable

Tags: belgian newspapers, copiepresse, copyright infringement, dirt, essense, excerpts, google, headlines, infringement damages, magazines, online versions, robot, scraper, Search Engine, search engines work, speck, verge, web spider, web spiders, website owner

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 9:39 am and is filed under google.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.