A group of Belgian newspaper publishers wants Google to pay up to €49.2 million (US$77.5 million) in damages for violating copyright law by publishing their articles on Google News and caching their web pages. It made the claim in a court summons served last week, and made public on Wednesday. The Belgian publishers' group Copiepresse first filed suit over the Google News service in April 2006."We entered in negotiations with Google to reach an agreement, but they have now failed," said Margaret Boribon, secretary general at Copiepresse. Now Copiepresse is asking for between €32.8 million and €49.2 million in damages, and wants Google to appear in court on Sept. 18 at a hearing to decide whether the newspapers' copyright was infringed and to rule on the claim for damages, according to the summons.
View: The full story @ PCWorld
Bet the accountants at Google can't wait for the weekend.
Disallow: /
or if they just hate google so much
Disallow: /
"All we want is to reach a fair agreement with Goggle, but if that fails we will go on with every possible procedure," she said.
Some Belgian newspaper, read by no more than a quarter of a million people, has managed to lose >$50 million....right.
Last edited by gaurav on 28 May 2008 - 18:29
Google is a major integral part of what helped grow the internet, social networking, and many other web technologies. Hell, they are even a slang word in every English dictionary(and probably other languages too. Because of this, Google, yahoo, msn, every other search engine that uses the same spider-bot technology is interwoven into the internet. The technology behind these engines are fundamental to the internet itself, and it is IMPOSSIBLE to ask this technology to be removed or changed.
The internet, and its crafters, give you everything you ever wanted in terms of indexing and search ability, and all they ask in return is that you use a robots.txt file if you don't want your particular website cached. EVERY SINGLE web developer knows this. It's web developing 101. It's taught in freaking pre-school of web developing.
These newspaper publishers know this, and they are just going to pretend 'not' to know in order to sue Google and get a money grab.
robots.txt should be made some sort of international, internet law, so dumb lawsuits like this don't happen.
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