Google Wins; Copiepresse Relents. Sorta.

European association Copiepresse, after successfully suing Google in a Belgian court for having the audacity to send warm users to their members' websites when the search demanded it, have decided maybe it's okay for Google to send them customers. One can imagine the panic that set in once news organizations actually checked their statistics and realized they weren't getting as much traffic once Google stopped indexing their sites back in September.

For those of you, like me, who were following this story for entertainment reasons... Don't worry. Copiepresse still doesn't cease to amaze. They don't object to Google linking to active articles, but they do object to linking to the archives, which requires a subscription (Never mind the fact that finding a short blurb about what is in the article might entice someone to buy). They also only will acquiesce if the search is done through Google's main search engine, not its news search. Apparently that's hitting below the belt.

Far be it for anyone to perform a search on a topic and be given enough information to have an idea of which result has the best chances of giving him what he searched for.

Google and Copiepresse are still ironing out some details about how to best proceed, so it's possible that they will eventually see the light. It's just sad that we're so many years into this new economy, and these companies still have no clue about how the Internet works, and about how people expect to find information that is relevant to them.

They are scared to death, so they sue. Maybe the new economy isn't so much different from the old economy, after all. - Cam Beck

Comments

[mvellandi]

The info would have been available at a library anyway.

What such companies should do in the future is offer advanced search and organizational options for a small subscription fee.