The hearing, which Google inexplicably failed to attend, was held on September 5th and the ruling, which found in favour of Copiepresse, was made on September 15th. Google has already been granted an appeal which is to be heard on November 24th this year.
For a company involved in search marketing we're astounded by Copiepresse's lack of judgement in this matter. If they wanted to protect their copyright then surely the obvious method was to adopt one of the following solutions:
- robots.txt, the Robots Exclusion Standard: by simply including this small text file in your site's root, you can stop the search engine robots from indexing specified content.
- Robots META tag: the use of the following tag on a HTML web page will indicate the site administrator doesn't want the page indexed ; meta name="robots" content="noindex".
Admittedly these methods rely on cooperation from the robot but no search engine worth its salt is going to ignore these. If you want a foolproof, all-encompassing robot solution then password protection is advised: set up a registration system where site visitors need to enter a user name and password in order to access the sites content.
Instead of putting into action any of the above, easily implemented, solutions, Copiepresse decided to use the courts to get what it wanted: which suggests to us that what it actually wanted was to force Google to remunerate for alleged copyright breaches.
Given that France's Le Monde has apparently made an arrangement with Google regarding access to its password protected content, perhaps this is just a case of small-cousin-inferiority complex.
In a comprehensive article on the subject, Danny Sullivan (founder and editor-in-chief of Search Engine Watch) stated:
"Google confirmed with me it has no payment system with Le Monde [...] something that Margaret Boribon, secretary general of Copiepresse, seemed to believe was the case."
Google Belgium has reacted quickly to avoid the court's threatened fines of €1 million per day and complied with the main aspect of the judgment by removing from their French and German language websites content from Copiepresse's publishers.
And, in fact, the newspapers that have won their removal from Google Cache and Google News seem to have been erased from the Google.be result pages altogether! Surely, this wasn't what they had in mind when they brought the action. Many may feel that this is an overreaction by Google.be, but others might feasibly argue that the initial overreaction was instigated by Copiepresse and their publishers.
The respected industry commentator, Lisa Barone, observed on Monday that, "Belgian newspapers may have 'won' this case, but it seems to me all they've won is less traffic, followed by less advertising. Congrats?".
Nicely put!
