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Comment by reso | Hacker News Reader

I can't decide whether I find things like this hilarious or disturbing. They could have fixed it with engineering, but they were either so uninformed or incompetent that they tried to fix it with a lawsuit.

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Or maybe one incompetent overrode them all.

Manager: Evans, get in here! Why are our news articles all over The Google?

Evans: Um, sir, they index our -

Manager: I don't want to hear your technical mumbo jumbo! Get legal on this to get it fixed YESTERDAY!

Evans: There's no need, it's literally a 5-minute fix, I could just add an entry to robots.txt while the coffee is brewing...

Manager: What did I just say about mumbo jumbo? Get out of here, and send in Stevens from Legal on your way.

Again, the lawsuit was over Google News' display of lead paragraphs and other excerpts from articles. It didn't pertain to the general search engine.

The lawsuit may not have, but the ruling certainly and explicitly does.

That's incorrect. The court's ruling specifically pertains to the use of article content in the Google News aggregator and its storage in Google's cache. There is no mention of simply linking to articles in the search engine, nor would there be reason for one since the lawsuit was over the use of copyrighted article excerpts, not hyperlinks.

What Google is doing is akin to the punishments Microsoft used to dole out in the 90s, such as increasing Windows OEM licensing fees or threatening to revoke licenses entirely. Google is playing a dangerous game in monopoly-conscious Europe.

Google uses separate crawlers for its search engine and its news service. Blocking the news service really would have been a trivial edit to their robots.txt file.

The lawsuit was over the use of lead paragraphs in the Google News aggregator, not the general search engine. Google is intentionally misinterpreting the verdict of the lawsuit in order to punish those who might challenge the company. Remember that Google also defied the court order to publish the result of the lawsuit on its Belgian sites, so it's obviously not afraid to thumb its nose at the courts.

"Nice online newspaper you've got there. Hate to see something happen to it."

> Google is intentionally misinterpreting the verdict of the lawsuit in order to punish those who might challenge the company.

Even if we stipulate this, how is that bad? Should Google be forced to deal with companies that screw with it? How far do you want to take that idea?

You're asking me how it's bad that Google is using a strong-arm tactic to punish content-owners who sued it? Surely, I don't need to answer that question, especially with Google's monopoly troubles in Europe. Google should let things be, respect the decision, and move on.

I'd also like to mention again how incredibly lame it is that my comments are being voted down in this discussion. All I did was correct people who assumed the lawsuit was pertaining to ALL search engine links. I'm at a loss as to what I wrote that warrants negative votes.

Didn't you notice every second link here is about Google? It's not permitted to say anything bad about Google here.

> You're asking me how it's bad that Google is using a strong-arm tactic to punish content-owners who sued it?

Yes, I am. If you sue someone, can you really expect them to be nice to you afterwords?

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