Feb

13

Google’s Statement on the Belgian Court Ruling

February 13, 2007 |

Google has issued a statement by its European Director of Communications and Pulbic affairs about the Belgian Court ruling in favor of the Belgian newspapers and against Google’s News service.

I think this was a short-sighted reaction by the Belgian press, which doesn’t understand that it stand to gain a lot by making its content easily available through Google (but also its competitors). Google itself puts it this way:

We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content. These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines. In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index—all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.

It is really sad that newspapers wouldn’t be able to take simple steps like this. But one also has to remember that this sets some dangerous precedent. Hopefully, though, most reasonable publishers will be able to work with Google and getting more readers instead of resorting to such stupid tactics as suing them.

In a sense, this is what we have come to expect from content owners, though. Total protection. Who knows, sooner or later your newspaper might come with DRM.

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