Some media companies are still holding on to their old-values, desperately trying to make money like they used to. Take Copiepresse for example, this Belgian French-language newspaper company wants Google News to pay them 49 million Euros. Why? Because Google News drives traffic to their sites? Because Google News introduces kids to this strange phenomenon called newspapers? No.., the way Copiepresse sees it, Google News is stealing away ad revenue by indexing the articles published by Copiepresse’s newspapers.
Sad but true, Copiepresse has already won a case like this against Google in 2006. And now they’re after the money.
Apart from the fact that Copiepresse can prevent the indexing by creating a robot.txt file, their attitude is simply embarrassing. Instead of profiting from all the beautiful opportunities the new web offers, Copiepresse just focuses on destruction.
Not only symbolizes this complaints of many media experts like Dan Lyons – aka Fake Steve Jobs-, it also ruins the reputation of traditional media in general. There’s a lot of talent and potential in that industry which I and probably many others would like to welcome in this beautiful new world, yet their executives are way too busy looking backwards. I’m sorry guys, those good old one-to-many days are almost over.
I haven’t done a background check on this, but if it’s true then it makes me wonder what kind of lawyers Google hired in 2006? It *seems* that a lawsuit like this should be easily won since (like the article says) if Copiepresse REALLY cared, they would’ve taken 5 minutes of their time to create a robots.txt and block every spider from ever entering their website…
@Jos I doubt Google can oblige Copiepresse to make a robot.txt; it’s yet another said story where old media tries to control everything. TechCrunch had a great article on this a few days ago as well http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/26/old-media-still-needs-to-get-over-its-control-issues/
Why not just remove their site addresses from Google index? I think the newspapers would be hurt by NOT being listed.
This seems a rather strange story. There’s an easy way out for both parties, and yet, according to the info in this post, neither are willing to make a move to end the dispute. Sounds fishy to me.