Bjoern Harste is a well-known German blogger – he owns a supermarket and writes about his daily experiences at work in his Shopblogger blog. Now, he received a Cease & Desist by the Sozialgericht Bremen for having one of his blog posts appear in the Google results top ten for “Sozialgericht Bremen” Welcome to the world wide web, Sozialgericht, and welcome to Google.
This is related to John’s previous column about the European attack on Google and the net. What’s the deal with Europe and the internet? Do they even remotely understand how it works? The supermarket did not seem to be claiming a trademark violation. It didn’t seem to be claiming any sort of defamation. The sole complaint seemed to be that it deserved the highest ranking in Google, so everyone above it had to step aside. What complete BS! No one deserves popularity. That’s absurd.
And do European businesses really think that citizens have no right to write about them on the internet? Any European readers want to set me straight and help me figure out what’s going on over there?
From what I’ve understood from it, this is just a overactive bureaucrat, nothing more.
And the fun part is: people that leave comments to his site, mention ‘Socialgericht Bremen’ 3 times or more in their comments, which makes the ratings even higher. Don’t think there’s much they can do, or they would need to get Google into court, because Google makes the rankings.
I live in the Netherlands and I’ve not heard from these things over here at all. ‘European Attacks …’ is a little too much.
Eh, this is just a company not “getting” the internet. It’s not a Europe wide thing: there are idiots in the US that do similar things.
Some companies here just want to use the same business practices the RIAA is using – sue away the competition 😉
Europe vs The Net is just spin.