Google News uses headlines and text snippets
from thousands of news sources worldwide, including newspapers,
broadcasters and online publishers. A group of Belgian newspaper
publishers, Copiepresse, took Google to court in Belgium and won a
preliminary ruling.
The Court of First Instance in Brussels has
backed that original decision, saying that Google's republishing of
material in Google News and in its search engine cache without the
permission of the authors breaks the law.
"We confirm that the activities of Google
News, the reproduction and publication of headlines as well as
short extracts, and the use of Google's cache, the publicly
available data storage of articles and documents, violate the law
on authors' rights," the ruling said, according to a translation
from news agency AP.
The ruling, though, appears to back Google's
existing procedure, by which the onus is on copyright holders to
get in touch with Google and notify the company of infringement.
Google would have to remove material within 24 hours or pay a
€1,000 a day fine, the ruling said.
That compromise is close to the current
situation, where Google will remove material on request. But
Copiepresse objected to the use of material without explicit prior
permission, so took the case to establish that Google should ask
everyone before using their material on its sites. It seems to have
lost that argument.
Google said that it believes that it acted
within the law and will appeal the ruling. "Google is disappointed
with today's judgment, which we will appeal," said a Google
spokeswoman. "We believe that Google News is entirely legal. We
only ever show the headlines and 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."
Google News does not earn advertising money
and links readers through to newspapers' own websites, but
Copiepresse argued that by bypassing site front pages the service
caused newspaper sites to lose ad revenue.
Copiepresse also objected to the inclusion of
members' material on Google search pages, which do carry
advertising. It said that the availability of Google-stored old
pages in its cache meant that newspapers lost the revenue they
earned from charging for access to their archives.
While Google was initially threatened with a
€1 million fine per day of infringement, that has been dropped to
€25,000 a day.
The ruling will strengthen the hands of
newspaper publishers in their dealings with Google, and many are
likely to ask for payment for use of their material.
Google, though, says that its service benefits
newspaper sites, and drives traffic to them.
"Search tools such as Google Web Search and
Google News are of real benefit to publishers because they drive
valuable traffic to their websites and connect them to a wider
global audience," said the Google spokeswoman.
