The Belgian press no longer wants Google and MSN’s news engines to “pick” their content from certain local newspapers available online. Why choose to pass up on thousands of free clicks?
After an initial victory that forced Google News Belgium to remove from “all its sites (Google News and Google ‘cache’ under any designation), all articles, photographs, and graphic representations of Belgian daily press publishers in French and German represented by the plaintiff” and to “publish, visibly and clearly without any commentary on its part on the homepage of ‘google.be’ and ‘news.google.be’ for an uninterrupted period of 5 days the entirety of the judgment to be published within 10 days of the significant order, under penalty of a fine of €500,000 per day of delay, it is now MSN’s turn to be fined by this association of press benefactors.
Nice Première is a partner of Google News France and, as such, we question the ultimate aim of this request, which represents significant traffic to the web pages of the sites concerned. There is no doubt that if a negotiating table were to be set up, some of the accusing media might well sit at it to receive a certain share of the cake!
It seems that France too views these legal decisions very favorably, and the National Federation of the French Press could also follow the steps of its Belgian counterpart for a Belgian story that, this time, doesn’t amuse many.
