Google v. Copiepress: Greed is Suicide for Belgian Press
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 18, 2006 | Share This
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Google has been ordered by a Belgian court to remove all French and German-speaking articles from the News results and cache of Google.be. Found in violation of copyright laws, Google will be fined 1 million euros per day that they fail to comply with the court order, effective this morning. The case was brought to court by Copiepresse, a Belgian copyright firm that represents French and German news journals, including Le Soir, La Libre Belgique and La Derniere-Heure. Google is restricted from re-publishing said journals without first obtaining permission and paying a significant fee. This is “to respect the laws of intellectual property, and as such, the work of the journalist and of the editor,” says Copiepresse.
Google responded by arguing that they operated within “fair use” policies, noting that articles are not re-published full text and that publishers have the right to opt-out of Google News. As Reuters reports, the search company wasn’t even informed of the case until two weeks after its commencement. As a result, Google claims it was not given a fair trial and plans to appeal the decision. Nevertheless, it appears that Google is complying with the court order. A search for “paris” in news.google.be returns a laughable list of articles about Paris Hilton (see screen shot below).
Likewise, a search for “Le Soir” in regular Google results doesn’t return a listing for the journal’s home page, but rather, a note of explanation for its absence –a further condition of the ruling.
In effect, the Belgians have censored French and German current events from their news results. Though the press might regain intellectual property, they’ll suffer greater losses in traffic and online visibility. According to a Pew Internet study, 31% of the surveyed audience regularly gets their news online. Of those, nearly half go to news aggregators such as Google News, Yahoo News and AOL News, while only 32% use specific media sites such as CNN.com or NYTimes.com. Though this study accounts only for American Internet users, another comparable study by InSites Consulting reports that,
“Surfers all across Europe exhibit fairly similar information needs when they roam the net. News (general), music and travel information clearly make up the European top three of most popular topics for internet searches… Striking is also the degree of interest in cultural news. Even though internet users in most European countries attach a great deal of importance to this type of information, they are apparently less than satisfied with the quality of the cultural information they find online and they also feel the offer of relevant sources needs to be expanded.”
These studies reveal an increasing use of search as a source of national and regional news, with Europeans expressing a specific desire for “culturally-relevant” coverage. Google News gives preference to local journals, so I assume that its censorship will upset a number of francophone and germanophone Belgians.
The Belgian press doesn’t appear to have much to say about the ruling, but several French and Belgian bloggers have expressed disappointment in the court’s removal of a helpful service. Says Par Gaetano of Expressions.be (forgive my rough translation),
“One has to wonder what idiot succeeded in convincing these editors that such a lawsuit was necessary. To deprive itself of Google traffic when their sales are eroding and when young people (the primary consumers of the web) have turned away from the news in print, its worse than a shot in the foot… it’s a shot in the head.”
At the moment, the Belgians don’t appear to be using search marketing as a means to recover any lost traffic (see our earlier post on search marketing for news publications), but this type of campaign could help alleviate inevitable losses. There are similar cases pending in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, which after this ruling, may be more inclined to settle in favor of the press. Though it’s unlikely that they would impose stronger orders than the Belgian court, these cases could have a drastic effect on search results across Europe.
Topics: International |