Is there any news in Belgium?

Posted by Marc Hodak on May 3, 2007 under Unintended consequences | Read the First Comment

Last year, the French-speaking Belgian news outlets sued Google to remove all links from Google News to their web-sites. Why? Because Google News was making ad revenues based, in part, on the availablity of content generated by the Belgian news sources, which weren’t seeing any of that money.

So, a Belgian court ordered Google to eliminate the links, and to post the court’s notice on Google.be for five days. That was enough to earn this decision some notoriety, in part because the court imposed a one million euro per day penalty for failing to comply with its order, and a 500,000 euro per day fine for failing to post the notice. Google promptly complied with the order by removing the links and, for good measure (“to avoid legal trouble”), all searchable references to the newspapers themselves; “Le Soir” or “La Libre Belgique” wouldn’t even come up on a web search.

Most people or businesses would not sue to be “disappeared.” People usually pay fees or ransoms to prevent that from happening. The French, who are paranoid about the declining use of their language, are particularly sensitive to American media ignoring their creations. If Google had a policy of linking everyone’s news except the French-speaking Belgians’…well, you don’t even want to know what that deluge would have looked like. In this instance, the Belgians imposed the threat of fines to achieve the opposite of what they would have wished in a sane, if imperfect world–fines far out proportion to the value created by those papers, let alone any losses they may have conceivably incurred as a result of Google’s links.

In fact, the economic losses were probably non-existent. In today’s world, most economists would have assumed the unpaid links created value for the publishers. In copyright law, that doesn’t matter; copyright holders are entitled to make decisions regarding their content, even if they make those decisions like ignorant yokels. The Belgians won on principle.

Then they saw what happened to the traffic to their web site.

In today’s news (AP-english version), the Belgian papers once again agreed to let Google News link to their websites, without any compensation.