IP Democracy: Court: No More Belgian Papers on Google

In a case that has always baffled me, Belgian newspapers have, once again, won a court victory that will keep their articles out of Google’s search index. Copiepresse, a group that represents Belgian, French language newspapers, has pursued litigation to enjoin Google from including its members’ articles in search results.

The decision today upholds a September 2006 ruling which favored Copiepresse and initially enjoined Google from including Belgian papers in its index. However, the Belgian court today lowered the fine Google must pay if it violates the injunction from the original amount, one million Euros per day, to 25,000 Euros per day.

Copiepresse wants Google to pay its members fees for including their articles in search results (like that’s ever going to happen.) Google plans to appeal and has defended itself by noting that publishers are always free to exclude their material from the search index through robots.txt features. Moreover, Google has argued that it’s good for publishers to be included in Google results, that many web sites fight with Google about their lack of inclusion in the search giant’s index.

Nevertheless, I guess that Belgian newspaper executives are dancing a merry jig over this judicial affirmation. But, just wait a few months. Traffic will dwindle and ad revenues will be hit, if they haven’t been harmed already due to the injunction that has been in place since September.

The poor state of publicly available web metrics doesn’t allow me to easily determine if the top Belgian papers have already been harmed by the Google shut-out, but Alexa data (always problematic, but particularly so in this case given what I believe is Alexa’s English-language tilt) shows a decidedly downward traffic trend for three of Belgium’s top newspapers — Le Soir, De Standaard and Belgisch Staatsblad (click on thumbnail below.) You can quibble with the data but the trend depicted by Alexa is certainly not looking good for Belgium’s newspapers.

Update: As a commenter points out, Copiepresse represents only the French language newspapers. De Standaard, a Flemish paper, isn’t part of the lawsuit but has asked to be pulled from Google’s index nonetheless. Not sure about Belgisch Staatsblad, which appears to publish in multiple languages.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 13, 2007 10:13 AM to IP Democracy