Belgian Newspaper Threatens Yahoo! If Links To It's Archives Are'nt Removed

A group of Belgian newspapers has asked Yahoo! Inc. to remove links to their archived stories from its Web search service, claiming they infringe copyright laws, their lawyers confirmed Friday.

The move follows a legal challenge by the group against Google Inc. that has seen Belgian newspaper content stripped from Google News pending a court ruling expected early this year.

In a statement, Yahoo! France insisted it "respects the copyright of content owners" and said it would "respond in an appropriate manner" to the complaint.

The legal warning was sent to Yahoo! France by lawyers acting for Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 19, mostly French-language, newspapers.
They complain that the search engine's "cached" links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.


SOURCE:
Physorg.com

As some may be aware, I am not a fan of current copyright laws,
and this is exactly one of the reasons why.

Information should never be kept from anyone, or charged money
for access to, and this is exactly what they're doing, what's worse
is that this information is old, and thus a considerably smaller amount
of people wioll actually be actively trying to find it in the first place.


Comments, Opinions?

Maybe organizations who a concerned with their content and search engines should make better use of the available crawl controls (robots.txt, etc). I suppose they want it indexed initially (to lure viewers) and then removed for the benefit of charging subscribers. Do not index your site in the first place if you don't care for the way the engines work. I suspect that it is not just a Yahoo problem, although Yahoo might not be crawling along the standards.

Originally posted by iori_komei
Information should never be kept from anyone, or charged money
for access to, and this is exactly what they're doing, what's worse
is that this information is old, and thus a considerably smaller amount
of people wioll actually be actively trying to find it in the first place.

They have every right to protect any material that is written by their staff and there is noting thing anyone can do about it according to the law. US papers like the NYT and Washington post to mention two have been requiring subscribers to pay to read archived articles for ages this is nothing new and something we will have to learn to live with.

I probably would do the very same thing with any material I wrote if I ever wrote anything that was/is worth anything that is.