Publishing dinosaurs try to stake their turf

This recent story about a Belgian newspaper publisher suing Google for caching its French-language web articles, and distributing via Google News made us smile here at Thinking Cap. Any webmaster worth their salt knows that Google adheres to the "robots.txt" standard.

If you don't want Google to index your content (we don't get a lot of call for this, but sometimes people want some info, like identities, kept hidden from the search giants), it's as simple as placing a single small text file in your web root folder, or a "noindex" tag in your page header.

The issue of a court penalizing Google for "spidering" a European website raises many other questions about content ownership. When you put something on the web, what rights can you keep to the ownership of it?

The Creative Commons has already tackled this issue, by creating a set of open standards for the fair use of digital content.

Here are some additional and insightful thoughts on this topic from Josh Bernoff.