Struan Robertson analyses on OUT-law.com the Court of First Instance ruling in favour of newspaper group Copiepresse that Google News and Google’s caching of web pages infringe copyright.
The Belgian court … ruled that it cannot be deduced that the absence of technical protections [the robots.txt and NOARCHIVE protocols] is an unconditional authorisation. Google’s method of storing copyright-protected work in its cache and granting access to the internet user without transferring the user to the original site is an act of unauthorised reproduction and communication to the public, contrary to Belgium’s copyright law, it said. Google’s situation was even more reprehensible, the court reasoned, because Google News went further than indexing and caching: it reproduced a headline and extract from a third party site.
… This case was more about money than the technicalities of copyright law. Copiepresse made clear that it wants [to be] paid for its content appearing in Google News. I can’t see Google paying up. So Copiepresse wins a moral victory but its members will surely have lost considerable traffic and consequent ad revenue that Google News brought to their sites. Users will lose access to some news and the use of the cache function. I can’t see how anyone wins here.
Google has pulled the plug on Copiepresse content. But Copiepresse wants to be indexed by Google and for Google to comply with its copyright policies. This is not possible with the current, simplistic protocols. A more sophisticated protocol, ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), is on the table. Meantime, Google is technically illegal says Brussels. We already knew that, didn’t we?
OK, so they want a more granular robots.txt. The question I couldn’t find answered in the ACAP FAQ (which I only skim read, to be fair), is what are the set of restrictions they want?
My suspicion is that they are going about this an unwise way. They should work out the minimal extra set of information they need to convey, extend robots.txt with it, and get their newspapers and Google to honour it. Then it would spread.
Also, does Copiepresse have a long term plan to actually gain revenue for their members from this? Currently they are losing revenue. The only way I can see them gaining is to effectively form a cartel of all Belgian newspapers and press releasers and similar, all of who refuse to be indexed on Google News Belgium unless all are paid an amount or cut of Google’s advertising revenue on the service. And if Google refuse to pay, they need to get Yahoo or Microsoft on board agreeing to pay FIRST, and cut off Google.