Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Bloggers Next European Battlefront?

Belgium and France have declared war on Google News, but in their crosshairs next? A Belgian court ruled that Google must stop linking to Belgian newspapers or pay more than $1 million a day in fines.

It seems that Europeans (Agence France-Presse had a similar objection last year) have a different view of copyright and don't like portals to excerpt from their news articles. It would follow that bloggers who similarly link to news reports would also be line for legal action.

As we all know, links from the portals, bloggers, or sites such as Digg drive lots of traffic, but maybe that fact is lost in translation. While it is shortsighted for newspapers to tell Google not to drive traffic to their websites, it is time for an international agreement on the concept of fair use.

It is also hypocritical if Belgian bloggers are allowed to similarly link to news articles (then we could call them Belgian wafflers). So Yahoo, Google, top bloggers, the association of newspaper publishers, let's all get together and set the rules. If Europeans want to enjoy the growth in ad revenue from online publishing, they need to compromise.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 01:31 PM
Permanent Link: Bloggers Next European Battlefront? | Comments (0)

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