GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Belgian Newspapers Demand $77Million because Google Sent Traffic

Found this story on TechDirt:

Quote:

Belgian Newspapers Demand Google Pay $77 Million For All The Traffic Google Sent Them
from the of-all-the-ridiculous-lawsuits... dept

Back in 2006, we couldn't believe that a group of Belgian French-language newspapers could be so confused about how the internet works that they would sue Google for daring to send them more traffic. Of course, if the newspapers were so upset about Google sending them traffic, they could have taken rather easy (robots.txt) means of preventing the indexing -- something they finally did after someone explained to them how search engines work.

But, of course, that's not what it was really about. It's always been about the money. So, it should come as no surprise that the same group of Belgian newspapers is now demanding that Google pay them $77 million. Google should counter that these newspapers owe them every damn cent of ad revenue that was generated by anyone clicking through from Google to those newspaper sites -- plus an additional fee for being so kind as to "advertise" those newspapers websites to those who had never heard of them before.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080528/0126221244.shtml

:1orglaugh