14February
Reaction to yesterday's victory over the evil empire has been mixed. In Le Soir's blog du sel, commentator Julien said, Marre marre marre et vive google !. Greg took the opposite opinion, c’est un autre pas en avant dans le respect des droits d’auteurs! Somewhere between the two, but closer to the latter than the former, lies our opinion.
But not that of many Sillycon Valley insiders. PC Advisor wonders, 'why would any publication not want to be G****ed?' and 'since when did Belgium get so bolshy'? Answers spring to mind such as "because they want to earn money from their work, and not have the dosh go to some furriners" and "you'd be surprised, the Belgians have always been very strong in defence of foreign invaders." Why did Britain go to war in 1914 if it wasn't in defence of Belgium?
23 Musings advertises his G****email address on every page, so is hardly going to be taking a neutral stance on this matter, and follows the "The newspapers will lose" line. Not if they have suddenly gained a cash stream of €100,000 per day without any effort on their part, merely negligence on G****e's. We'll come back to winners and losers later.
Danny Levinson at China Tech News has almost lost it. The court issued a dumb decision, that on hindsight in a few years it will be ashamed of having made... Am I too going to be prosecuted because I visited those Belgium newspaper websites and my browser automatically stored cache copies of their webpages on my computer? It's a decision that is strictly in accordance with Belgian law, something that G****e has taken particular delight in ... completely ignoring. "We are a bunch of Merkins, we can do whatever the hell we like. Copyright is so last millennium." Seriously, though, if G****e has anything approaching a case, why on earth did it not bother to turn up in court last September to present its arguments? Allowing a decision to be entered against you by default is the hallmark of a particularly slipshod organisation.
No, Mr. Levinson, you will not be prosecuted, for the newspaper is implicitly granting you permission to use its work in the normal course of browsing the web. Scraping its work, putting that up for all to see, and garnering a profit from it would not be covered by reasonable web browsing, would be a breach of copyright, and is exactly why G****e has been hauled up before the beak. But this is all moot, because CTN goes on to say, So long as G****e is not providing full text, it should be fine. Well, that'll be the flaw in the argument.
It's always good to hear from someone who doesn't give a knee-jerk reaction, and does comprehend at least some of ramifications of the matter under discussion. Joe Duck is bang on about this subject. G****e’s spectacular success has not been primarily a function of G****e’s own efforts, rather it has been their brilliance monetising other people’s content. (Emphasis in the original.) Finally, someone has come along and told the advertising behemoth that it is acting illegally, it is acting unethically, and it must stop. Now.
A Demi Grauniad is probably near the target, as well. The London-based orgna reckons that the most likely outcome ... is a compromise offering publishers greater control of what material is picked up, and how it is used. But the advertising brokerages will stop short of paying for their content, and that is almost certain to ensure that they will never be able to offer a full service.
It's very hard to predict who will be the major losers from such a stand-off. The Belgian press will lose some web traffic, but I really don't think that this is as much of a loss to them as the Sillycon Valley-heads are making out; newspaper aggregators are still a fairly marginal product, and if someone really wants to know the news from a particular country, the Yankee-centric G****e is probably the worst place to start.
The wild-card, of course, is if the first news aggregator to agree to pay for content finds that this is a beneficial position. On their own, the Belgians won't make that; if other courts across the Napoleonic Code follow the precedent and half of Europe's papers are pulled, that would change matters entirely.
The Belgian press association, Copiepresse, has already started to target Yahoo's copyright-infringing news scraper. G****e's next target is to be more evil than Evil Edna.
