Belgium: copyright complaints against search engines continue

Posted by John Burke on October 20, 2006 at 3:53 PM

Copiepresse, the organization that helps protect the copyright of French and German-language publications in Belgium, has issued Microsoft with a "cease and desist" letter, demanding the removal of its member publications' content from the MSN website. Copiepresse recently won a court case against Google over the same matter.

Copiepresse is interested in an advertising revenue sharing program with the software giant which also runs the Net's third-most popular search engine. Microsoft is complying with Copiepresse's wishes and currently in negotiations.

Google, on the other hand, has complied but has argued that the court case was completely unnecessary because there are simple means of removing any publisher's content from the search engine's spiders.

In related news, the popular political blog, The Daily Kos, has ordered itself removed from Google News. Daily Kos founder and blogger, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, had some harsh words for the news aggregator on his blog:

"Google News is becoming unusable. They need some serious soul-searching about what they are and what their mission is. A 'news' operation needs to present news, and credible news at that. That means get rid of the blogs (mostly opinion), get rid of the no-name sites, the conspiracy sites, and the rest of that crap."

Source: The Guardian

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