Google has come to an undisclosed arrangement with SORAM and
SCAM, two societies representing photographers and journalists
respectively. The groups had joined Copiepresse's copyright
infringement action against Google over its Google News
service.
Copiepresse represents some Belgian newspapers and it took
Google to court earlier this year alleging that its Google News
service, which publishes snippets of and links to newspaper
stories, broke copyright law by copying snippets of stories without
the permission of the newspapers.
It won a judgment in a Belgian court in September in which
Google was told to remove its members' stories from Google News or
pay a €1 million a day fine. Google asked for a re-hearing of that
case. That hearing took place last Friday.
SOFAM and SCAM had joined Copiepresse's legal action but have
now cut a deal. "Google is delighted that SOFAM and
SCAM have decided not to pursue this litigation," a Google
spokeswoman told OUT-LAW. "The agreement we have reached with
both these authors' societies will enable us to make
extensive use of their content in innovative new ways beyond what
copyright law allows without the permission of authors."
"Google respects copyright law, which we believe lies at
the heart of the creative process," she said. "As today's
agreement demonstrates our approach is to work in partnership with
content creators and owners"
Google did not say whether it had paid the groups or agreed to
future payments, nor did it say whether or not it was negotiating
with newspaper groups to either pay or cut an ad revenue share
deal.
Though Google News does not carry advertising, Google's search
results pages do. Copiepresse's case objects not just to the Google
News service but also to the copying and local storing of web pages
by the search engine, accessible to users by the 'Cached' link in
Google's search results.
Google has argued that it does not think that it has broken the
law because it uses just small parts of each article in Google
News, which it says copyright law allows. "It is important to
remember that Google News never shows more than the headlines, a
few snippets of text and small thumbnail images. If people want to
read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper's
website," the spokeswoman.
Margaret Boribon, the general secretary of Copiepresse,
previously told OUT-LAW that it would seek to take action against
other news aggregators. "The law is the law. We are producing
protected works and the law in Europe says clearly that to re-use
that content you have to ask for permission," said Boribon. "We
want every search engine, aggregator or re-user of our content to
respect it and to ask for agreement and to pay a fair price."
