Chark Blog - Copyright news from Brussels and Washington

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Readers may have ascertained that I'm not a great lover of bureaucracies, least of all the rapidly-developing eurocracy. However, some good things do come out of Brussels and this week's good (and bad) news comes from the Director of the excellent Federation of European Publishers, Anne Bergman-Tahon. The Belgian courts have found against Google and its traffic diversion activities.

French speaking and German speaking (Belgium has a 60.000 German-speaking community) newspaper publishers represented by Copiepresse, an association who looks after their interest in the field of reproduction (especially for reprography), had decided to take action in order to stop Google copying and reproducing their content on its cache sites. They claimed that doing so, the ‘do no evil’ company was infringing their copyright and causing them to lose control of their websites and their content.

A Belgian court ruled on 5 September against Google in a case associated with Google News. The ruling cited both copyright and the EU database directive in ordering Google to remove articles from its service. Whilst Google News links to an article on the newspaper publishers’ servers, once the publishers removed the article it still remained accessible on Google News via the link to the Google cache. The appearance of automatically generated headlines on Google news means that users may avoid or by-pass the newspaper sites, resulting in a reduction of traffic and therefore loss of advertising revenue to the publishers and their authors and journalists. Also, Google News circumvents other protections for the publisher such as copyright notices and terms of use.

Google was told to remove stories from certain publications on its Belgian news website or face a daily fine of €1m.

At first Google decided not to obey the Court ruling arguing they never received the citation to Court.

Friday 22 September, a Brussels civil Court has again ruled in favour of the newspapers and confirmed that Google must publish the Court ruling on its website which they refused to do considering it ‘completely disproportionate’. Finally, Saturday morning the judgement was published on www.google.be. It should remain there till Wednesday.

In retaliation (frequently refered to as throwing toys out of the pram - RC), Google has stopped referencing the newspapers and they no longer appear on either www.google.be or www.googlenews.be. The websites of Le Soir, La Libre Belgique ou La Derniere Heure no longer appear as main references and if you type Le Soir on google.be, you can access jobs or houses pages but not the front page.

Perhaps the new motto for Google should be: ‘Do not get in our way’,

On a brighter note good news on copyright from the United States. This is a joint press release from the Association of American Publishers and Cornell University:

Jointly Written Guidelines Affirm That Copyright Law Applies to Electronic Course Content

New York, NY, September 19, 2006: As part of ongoing discussions over the manner in which Cornell University provides copyrighted course content to students in digital formats, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Cornell recently announced a new set of copyright guidelines to govern the use of electronic course materials on the library's electronic course reserves system, on faculty and departmental web pages, and through the various "course management" websites used at Cornell. The guidelines affirm that the use of such content is governed by the same legal principles that apply to printed materials.

The guidelines, which were jointly drafted by Cornell and AAP, make it clear that faculty must obtain permission to distribute such works to the same extent as permission is required with respect to reproductions and distributions of publishers' copyrighted works in hard-copy formats.

"Cornell and AAP concur that instructional use of content requiring the copyright owner's permission when used in a printed coursepack likewise requires permission when used in an electronic format," said John Siliciano, Vice Provost of Cornell.

"The Publishers and the authors they represent are gratified that Cornell has responded positively to their concerns and has taken a leadership role on this issue in the academic community," said Pat Schroeder, former Congresswoman and head of the AAP. "With more and more content now available in digital form, it is important to clarify the copyright responsibilities that accompany use of that content - and to be sure that colleges and universities are enforcing the rules they adopt."

Mrs. Schroeder continued, "AAP hopes that Cornell's actions will set an example for other colleges and universities and provide them an opportunity to review their own practices and institute similar guidelines."

Discussions are ongoing between AAP and Cornell concerning additional approaches that may be appropriate to encourage compliance with copyright law so that instructors' postings of electronic course content conform with legal requirements.

If only Google...

10/1/2006 8:47:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

As you were worried that nobody had commented on this post...

Before becoming a bookseller, I was involved with a start-up company in the sustainable forestry sector, and pne of my jobs was to scour the web looking for projects that (potentially) might have benefitted from our timber-origin verification technology (alternatively known as "companies that we could sell our technology to").

Google was our starting point - but over time, it dawned on us that individual articles from a number of (expensive) subscription services in the forestry sector were being cached by Google - we were harvesting interesting and relevant content and mining it for contacts, but in actual fact we were ripping off the subscription services (with Google's help).

However, a number of references coming up on Google were for 'subscription only services' which Google indexed, but didn't make available through the cache. So presumably there is a mechanism for publishers to work with Google to regulate articles and generate subscription revenue.

From a commercial perspective, it's worth making the point that the subscription model was key. What typically happened was if/when we spotted a compelling article, and (key point) a subscription model was in place to allow us to subscribe to that article only (i.e. $5 to gain access versus $300 for a year's subscription) then we paid the fee. If the subscription model was of the $300-per-year, then we could usually reverse-engineer the title and teaser paragraph to find the same story covered elsewhere on the web.

Mark Thornton

10/1/2006 8:59:02 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Mark, I think the issue is not whether a particular set of circumstances allow or don't allow people to steal other people's intellectual property. The issue for me is whether society actually values IP enought to warrant protecting it at all. Obviously I think it should but I can understand the (very dangerous and simplistically convincing) counter-arguments.

richard charkin

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