AdulauWikiDiary: 2007-03-04 A Course For CopiePresse

In Belgium, we have Copiepresse a Belgian association representing the editors and having a very personal perspective of Internet and its operation. Copiepresse is complaining (with the bloody support of the Belgian legal framework) that an indexer is gathering pages from their press editors. Of course, an indexer is just a robot crawling the pages and following the robots file edited by the editor of the website. If you check the robots.txt on the website of a Copiepresse member, lesoir.be :

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Instead of starting legal complain, they should ask their technical people to just edit the robots.txt file to disallow the GoogleBot?. That's simple, cost nothing … but Copiepresse won't make any press-release, it's less fancy and visible. By the way, there is a nice introduction about robots.txt for the ignorant editors, they are often the ones member of a "authors rights" society. Sorry I'm too sarcastic today…