Thursday, 15 February 2007

Google Loses Belgian News Battle

Google has been put in a spot as it lost a copyright lawsuit to Belgian newspapers that had asked the company to remove headlines and links to articles posted on its news site without their permission. Google claims that they will appeal as it feels they were completely...

Google has been put in a spot as it lost a copyright lawsuit to Belgian newspapers that had asked the company to remove headlines and links to articles posted on its news site without their permission.

Google claims that they will appeal as it feels they were completely in the right. On the other hand, the cout ruling thought otherwise, "Google is reproducing and publishing works protected by copyright," it said. "Google cannot call on any exceptions set out by law relating to copyright or similar rights."

It decided in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 17 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine's "cached" links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell.

"This ruling does not mean that everywhere else or every other judge in any other country would rule in the same, even in Belgium," said Yoram Elkaim, legal counsel for Google News. "There are conflicting rulings on those issues, which are fairly new and complicated."

"I'm sure other newspaper publishers are probably going to read the decision carefully, but the most important factor is that it's not the ultimate ruling," he said. "In our view we have complied with the ruling fully since September," Elkaim added.

"It shouldn't preclude us from continuing to collaborate with news publishers who generally ... do want their content to be searchable so that more people can find their content on their Web site," he said. "The vast majority of publishers are happy to be included in Google News, and, actually, we receive more complaints from publishers that are not included."

In the last week of January 2007, Yahoo had been slapped with a warning by a conglomerate of Belgian newspapers and publishers. The group wants Yahoo to stop displaying its members' articles and photos. The group calls itself Copiepresse, and has issued legal notice to Yahoo claiming the material without prior authorisation constituted breach of copyright.

In its defense Yahoo! officials said the engine respected the copyright of content owners and would respond in an appropriate manner.

Copiepresse also talked about Google and MSN search engines. In October 2006, a Belgian court asked Google to remove French- and German-language Belgian newspaper content from search results.

Google at that point had challenged the ruling, saying it published teasers of the articles with links to the original.