Interesting to note yesterday the announcement that Google has won a legal case regarding its image search functions, the case was related to the adult website Perfect10 which claimed that Google was undermining its business. This reminds me of the court case brought about in 2006 by Copiepresse in Belgium where the Belgian company got upset that Google was including snippets of its articles in Google News as well as cacheing them.

To stop Google and others, it would of taken just three lines of code, to prevent search engines investigating the site its this tricky line of code here and for the cache its the equally complicated line here, anyway, this has been covered before so there is little point in  labouring the point. The incredible thing is though, that Copiepresse have now done this, so after going through all the trouble of a court case they did the thing they could of done in the first place and put two lines of code in. I’m going to assume there’s a bunch of executives over there with a severe lack of understanding on how to best reap the potential rewards of the internet, they probably have a similar outlook to the Telegraph.

In addition, the papers only really hurt themselves in this, a recent report by Hitwise indicated that nearly a quarter of traffic to news websites comes from search engines, this will be why Copiepresse again were in a stew when they found they werent indexed on Google at all and make a quick agreement. Google and others steadily drive traffic to peoples sites and yet they get upset about it. I wonder how long it will be before those pulling the strings work out that it doesn’t make commercial or logical sense to try and treat the internet in the same manner other mediums are handled in terms of strict copyright.