Google News loses round one to Belgians in copyright suit

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 14 February 2007 02:18

Your IT - Home IT

It appears that French language newspapers don't like traffic driven to their websites. Belgian print media group Copiepresse has taken a lead from Agence France Presse (AFP) and successfully sued Google for displaying headlines and linking to stories from 17 papers through its Google News aggregation site.

The ruling in the Brussels Court of First Instance will be appealed by Google which through its lawyers claims that it will not have wider ramifications because most news publishers want to have their content linked by Google.

A key issue for Copiepresse is that, like many newspaper groups from the pre-Internet age, it's newspapers charge readers for archived content on the web. However, Google often provides access to archived content on newspapers through its cached storage. However, like AFP, Copiepresse also objected to the reproduction of headlines and text from its articles.

The Google News site aggegates headlines text from the opening sentences of stories from a variety of online sites around the world. When users click on the headlines, they are directed through to the site from which the story is sourced. Google's argument, which is supported by a majority of online publishers, is that it only republishes samples of stories in line with existing fair use laws and drives traffic to the original content providers.

After its initial court room success, Copiepresse is now pressing to have Google retrospectively pay daily fines of €25,000 since September 2006. The newspaper group is also pressing ahead with negotiations with Yahoo and MSN.

The court ruling may have opened a can of worms which may see the print media forced to come to terms with the new way of distributing content on the Internet. With many online publications making archived content freely available, the business model of charging for access to archived content employed by traditional print media may prove to be increasingly untenable.