Back in 2006 a bunch of Belgian news publishers (Copiepresse) successfully sued Google to stop the Google News Service from publishing the headlines from the Belgian newspapers.

 

The publishers were particularly upset at the fact that one was able to still read the headlines and first couple of sentences from Google’s site long after the news was moved behind the pay-for-use section of the various newspapers’ sites. The Belgian Court, where the case was heard, ruled in essence that Google was infringing on the publishers’ copyright by caching the news on its own servers. Google was thus ordered to remove all the material from its site, as well as pay a fine of €25 000 for each day that the copyright was infringed (coming to some €3.5m!).

 

In essence this case was about advertising revenue – Google’s main source of income. The publishers of course were also interested in the advertising revenue which could be earned on their own sites and which they lost out to since users were now not clicking through to the publishers’ newspaper sites. It seems however that the publishers forgot that many people came to their sites through Google – something they very quickly realised when Google (after losing the case) went ahead and removed all links to the various newspaper sites together with the offending material.

 

Other than the fines, Google was never ordered to pay the publishers any amount in damages for the copyright infringement. The publishers have now issues summons against Google in the Belgian courts for an amount of €49m for the alleged damage they suffered because of the copyright infringement (I never knew newspaper online advertising revenue was this lucrative!). The same group of publishers also instituted action against Yahoo as well as MSN in a bid to block the other big online search engines from infringing on its copyright.

 

The damages which the publishers are now claiming for, are in addition to the fines which the court levied on Google. This comes while Google’s appeal on the original copyright infringement case is still pending and will be heard by the Belgian court sometime in September of this year.

 

The outcome of this case could have some far-reaching impact on the legal framework around copyright in the European Union, as there are already rumours going around that the EU will be looking into its copyright laws because of the Google case.

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