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Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

OK, it says they filed a lawsuit against Google because they didn't want Google to LINK to their articles without paying a fee for linking. They won the lawsuit in court and so Google removed links to their articles from their search index, as they requested, and now they are mad about it. Why is the story "Google blocking" them. Google's only doing what a court ordered after the papers sued asking for that.

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As I understand it, they wanted Google News to stop linking to their articles; not the regular search results.

From court order, via http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=2160

> Order the defendant to withdraw the articles (...) from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name (...)

The other articles linked from http://slashdot.org/story/06/09/18/115203/Google-News-Remove... are down now, but I believe the original lawsuit was in that very spirit: remove their articles from all Google's websites. Not just from Google News.

Logical argumentation aside, Google's in no position to second-guess a court order ;-)

Why did Associated Press put such a negative spin to the story? We can only guess...

They sued because Google News was using lead paragraphs from their articles. Google is most definitely block them, because the court's decision didn't pertain to the general search engine. In effect, Google is punishing these content-owners for challenging Google's use of their content in its service.

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