Google falls foul of Belgian waffle

Adam Turner
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 04:05

Opinion and Analysis

Would you sue someone standing by the highway holding a massive sign pointing to your restaurant? The Belgian courts have ruled that, by publishing this paragraph and advertising this site, Google News is infringing my copyright.

Google News is a free global advertising service for news sites which, for many, would bring in the bulk of their traffic and thus their advertising revenues. Would you chase away someone holding a massive sign pointing to your restaurant? That's what the Belgians are doing. Sure you've got the right to ask the sign-holder to go away, but then they'll just start holding up a sign for the restaurant next door you'll be left with no customers.

Do you see anyone suing Slashdot or Digg? No, because only a fool wouldn't want to appear on such sites because they bring in so much traffic. For many news sites, their entire business model consist of one sentence; "Get on Google News". Google is just the target of lawmakers because its the biggest fish in the ocean and, ironically, they want to make headlines by challenging Google.

Google argues that fair use laws cover what it's doing - it only reproduces a tiny portion of each story, it attributes this snippet to the author and it even links directly to the original text. This argument seems to stand up elsewhere in the world but apparently the Belgians see it differently. It's like suing the phone directory for giving you a free listing. I wonder if they'll ban free advertising completely.

The decision could be a landmark ruling for the web, but I couldn't see too many other news sites rushing out to insist Google take down that free giant billboard.