Google Dispute with Belgian Press Partly Settled with Technology
A long-standing dispute between Google and the Belgian Association of Newspaper Editors (Copiepresse) over Google's right to store archives of Belgian papers' content appears to have either subsided or been settled today, after publishers finally took Google's suggestions and embedded a tag in their pages that prevents archiving.
Perhaps for several years, Google's corporate Web site gave instructions to publishers about how to include tags in their pages instructing Google's crawlers not to archive their content. A Web site in a foreign country - for which, under Belgian law, Google qualifies - is prohibited from making archived copies of newspaper content without a valid license.
Last September, the Court of First Instance there ordered Google to stop making those archives. After an initial flirtation with the idea of skirting the ruling, Google relented, and in so doing, posted the equivalent of a takedown notice on the Google.be homepage, marring its otherwise pristine white appearance.
But one of Copiepresse's chief grievances was apparently not with the licensing law, but with the fact that Google News links directly to articles, bypassing news publishers' front pages. Such traffic diversions reduce the advertising value of those front pages, and diminish sites' capability to direct visitors in predictable manners - a problem which all news sites face to one degree or another.
As US sites learned long ago, by including a certain <META> tag in the <HEAD> element of their HTML pages, Google's and other search engines' crawlers can be instructed not to generate those archives. Specifically, the instruction to use is: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
As a result, Belgian law is left unblemished, and the "Cached" link that Google normally generates automatically beside search results, is omitted. Users are then compelled to go directly to the source Web site for details.
Due to last February's court ruling finding Google in material violation of Belgian law, though, it may still owe fines - perhaps as much as the equivalent of $32,000 per day for each day Copiepresse failed to read Google's directions.