Agreeing with Google Cheerleaders

Lenssen and Weinberg are cheering Google on their move to obey a Belgian court order and delete content stolen from Belgian newspapers from their caches. That will show those “old, dying media” that Google is not be crossed (actually Weinberg used somewhat more drastic language).

I agree with them. Good move by Google.

On this blog, I have often said that Google has no right to copy other peoples’ content in their cache of the whole web without a license.

Therefore, this kind of case is not only about Google’s right to steal the newspapers’ content by republishing. It is also about Google’s right to steal it in the first place by adding it to their search database.

And I sure cheer Google as well for understanding that point and complying with the court order, even for different reasons than Lenssen and Weinberg.