L’enfants terrible at Copiepresse returned to making news instead of reporting it again. The gang that can’t seem to figure out how to write a simple robots.txt file to deny Google’s spiders access to their content now want to be paid for this.

Copiepresse wants $77 million in damages from Google for storing and republishing content in Google News. The International Herald Tribune said Copiepresse believes Google violated copyright law in indexing stories; Google has yet to comment on the latest Copiepresse news.

The agency charges for access to its articles, and sued Google previously over its indexing of smaller bits of content for Google users. Copiepresse won a judgment against Google in Belgium, requiring Google to post that judgment on the Google.be homepage for 5 days.

This time around, Copiepresse wants a 20-day publication of a judgment in favor of Copiepress placed on Google’s Belgian properties, along with the money. The Brussels Court of First Instance previously dismissed the concept of fair use (so much for so-called enlightened thinking on the Continent) in its earlier decision in Copiepresse’s favor.

Copiepresse created another spat over stories from news agencies it represents having links coming to them from another site. This time, Copiepresse will take on an executive agency, the European Commission, for the offense.

Quel horreur! People following links to read stories that have been posted on the Internet, with no web server configuration to redirect them to a registration page that would satisfy the Copiepresse suits? What’s next, Le Chocolatier Manon switching to carob?

A Bloomberg report said Copiepresse believe the EC violated copyrights by linking to stories from websites managed by the agency. A court in Brussels began investigating the claim, which could lead to further legal action by Copiepresse.

Copiepresse sued Google in 2006 over Google News linking to stories from publishers using Copiepresse for copyright management services. Google lost a judgment in that case; Google and Microsoft gave in to Copiepresse’s demands and removed the relevant publishers from their indexes.

Attacking a government agency is a much different, aggressive tactic. Such an agency could quietly retaliate in all kinds of ways. And here we just thought Copiepresse lacking good judgment for not putting up a proper robots.txt file for their publishers to keep out the offending search engines. Could a painfully detailed tax audit be in Copiepresse’s future?

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/copiepresse-sues-ec-over-links-2008-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/google-fights-back-with-copiepresse-appeal-2007-07 http://www.webpronews.com/google-fights-back-with-copiepresse-appeal-2007-07#comments Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:56:16 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=38925 Belgium becomes the focal point for a heated confrontation between Google, and the news management organization that beat it in court.

Google Fights Back With Copiepresse Appeal

Google doesn’t lose in court very often, but they took what for them equated to a humbling beating from Copiepresse last year. Copiepresse won a judgment against Google for indexing news content from websites it represents.

That decision included forcing Google to post the judgment for five days on its Belgian portal. The company did so, in a small font size, and their subsequent posts on their official blog made it clear they weren’t happy about this.

Google and Copiepresse subsequently reached a partial settlement of their differences. But a complete resolution will have to wait for an appeals process to take place.

A Bloomberg report about the case found from Google that an appeal had been filed ten days ago. This won’t interrupt their ongoing negotiations with Copiepresse, however.

Google believes its use of small excerpts of news content in Google News complies with copyright laws. A Belgian court disagreed, finding “no exception” in their laws for this, the report said.

An AP report out of the Belgian capital said the two sides are enjoying “constructive dialogue” following their contentious courtroom battle. Copiepresse accused Google of infringing on the rights of the papers it manages.

Rather than simply placing a relevant robots.txt file on the web servers for the papers in question, Copiepresse took Google to court. Copiepresse’s win forced Google to post a notice about it on their Belgian home page for five days.

The two sides have made a statement about the recent change. They jointly said in the report that Google could reference Copiepresse-managed content. However, Google will not be archiving copies of stories.

“The Belgian French and German-language daily press publishers and Google Inc. intend to use a quiet period in the court dispute to continue their efforts to identify tangible ways to collaborate in the long term,” they said in the report.

Copiepresse charges people to access older articles, a practice used in the US by papers like the New York Times. The use of the no-archive meta tag will keep Google from caching articles appearing on Copiepresse news websites.

The per diem penalty for noncompliance was at least dropped to more reasonable levels. In the initial ruling, Google would have to pay 1 million euros for every day it did not comply with the ruling. The new judgment dropped that fee to 25,000 euros daily.

Google also said the company was "very pleased that the judge agreed Google should be given notice of articles and other material that content owners want removed."

The company has maintained in other arenas, when copyright concerns have been broached, that by showing only snippets of copyrighted text and linking out to original sources, no copyright laws have been violated. The Belgian court was the first to completely disagree.

That doesn’t mean Google’s stopped arguing their case. From Google’s statement:

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.

– Rachel Whetstone, European Director of Communications and Public Affairs, Google, Inc.

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Yahoo Takes Google’s Place In Belgium

Caching access to Belgian newspapers has Copiepresse up in arms again. This time they have designated Yahoo France as their bte noire and want them to stop their link practices.

An AP report noted that Copiepresse, a copyright protection group in Belgium, has sent legal warnings to Yahoo France. They want free access to archived articles removed.

The 19 mostly French-language newspapers represented by Copiepresse charge for access to their article archives. Being able to navigate to them via Yahoo France hinders their ability to pocket an access fee for this content.

Yahoo answered the attack by noting they would ‘respond in an appropriate manner’ to the complaint.

Copiepresse first became worthy of attention in September 2006. News of their criticism of and lawsuit against Google was reported at Chilling Effects, a website that serves as a clearinghouse for information on online rights.

Part of the judgment against Google required them to post the court’s decision against them for a five day period. Google did so, at the smallest possible legible font size, on the main page for Google.be.

A Google executive later blogged at length about how Google benefits publishers and respects copyrights. Traffic from Google can benefit a site greatly from an advertising perspective, as higher volumes of visitors should provide much better ad performance.

Google’s disagreement with Copiepresse will hit courtrooms again now that the new year is under way. If Google cannot overcome copyright infringement accusations, it could have a negative impact on the way they gather content online.

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Bringing The Sitemaps Concepts To News Sites

While Google has emphasized the positives for using its newest Sitemaps product, they also took a little swipe at the publishers who have attacked the company in court over its news indexing practices:

The initial release is English-language only, so even if an agency like Belgium’s Copiepresse wanted to implement it immediately, they will have to wait for forthcoming options in additional languages.

Instead of simply offering Google News a RSS feed of their articles, publishers can craft a sitemap that tells Google exactly where its crawlers should go to find articles. Publishers can use the tools at Google Webmaster Central to determine where there may be indexing problems, and correct them for future crawls.

“These error reports will explain any problems we experienced crawling or extracting news articles from a publisher’s site,” Google News product manager Nathan Stoll wrote on the Official Google blog.

Andy Golding from the Google News team promised timeliness would be a focal point for news crawls, especially when using sitemaps:

The additional data, including error reporting, that Google delivers to publishers should be a worthwhile reason for news sites to check out the new sitemap being offered.

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Instead of battling with Copiepresse on its home turf in Belgium’s Court of First Instance, Microsoft chose to comply with the firm’s requests to remove German and French language articles managed by Copiepresse from its websites.

A Forbes report cited Sylvie Irzi, from Microsoft Belgium, who said, “Microsoft does not, for the moment, wish to enter into legal debates with Copiepresse, and is provisionally complying with their requests.”

Despite the compliance, Microsoft does not necessarily believe Copiepresse is in the right on this issue. But considering how poorly Google fared in court against Copiepresse, Microsoft may be taking the easy road out of this mess.

Microsoft also may wish to stay away from negative headlines in Europe. The company has been fighting antitrust officials in the EU, and their case will be heard eventually in the Court of First Instance in Belgium, which is where its appeals will be heard eventually.

Google already had to display a copy of the court’s decision against it on its Belgian home page for five days. The company fought the requirement, but finally posted the judgment at Google.be, in very small print.

Daily fines of one million Euros per day accumulated until lawyers for Copiepresse were satisfied that Google was removing its managed content. Copiepresse asked that the fines be suspended, leaving the company with 34 million euros, or roughly $43 million, to pay.

News of the case against Google came to light in September, when a report from Chilling Effects exposed the Belgian court decision in favor of Copiepresse. Google had been ordered to remove “the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French – and German-speaking daily press…from all their sites.”

Google made its displeasure with the decision known in a pair of blog posts from corporate executives. Rachel Whetstone, Google’s European director of communication and public affairs, said in September, “(I)f publishers don’t want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard (something that webmasters understand) enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content. It’s nearly universally accepted and honoured by all reputable search engines.”

The next day, Google’s David Kun, VP for content partnerships, posted about content and copyrights. He did not directly mention Copiepresse, but his post definitely rung with commentary that could have been aimed easily at Copiepresse:

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Belgians Deny Google News

Copiepresse in Belgium pressed the claim against Google and won a judgment against the search advertising company. Google must publish the decision on its Belgian domain homepage and remove news, photographs, and graphic representations from Copiepresse from Google News and its cached results.

The company faces fines for failing to comply with either requirement, according to the order published on Chilling Effects:

Google also has to repay about $1,350 in expenses and court costs as well.

The Court found Google in violation of laws related to copyright and ancillary rights, and a law on databases. It rejected arguments that exceptions could be exercised regarding either of the laws in question.

This is not the first time Google has run afoul of news organizations with regards to the operation of Google News. Agence France-Presse (AFP) has been fighting in court with Google since March 2005 over indexing its news content.

AFP has deals in place with sites like Yahoo! News to license and carry its articles. Google has long claimed that its indexing of content is consistent with fair use practices in the United States.

That practice has caused some grumbling among website publishers. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen complained that search engines were “leeches” hoarding much of the Web’s value. Nielsen declined a public challenge to ban Google from indexing his site, however.

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