Belgian Court Deals Google a Bombshell (business week)

[typist]

Publishers who sued the Internet giant for copyright infringement have won their case. A one-off glitch—or the end of search-engines as we know them?

It has all the makings of an epic David vs. Goliath battle: A band of scrappy Belgian publishers, citing copyright infringement, have taken on Google and emerged victorious. On Feb. 13, a Belgian court said the search giant could not reproduce certain copyrighted titles and summaries on its Belgian Google news or Google.be Web site. What's more, the Mountain View (Calif.) company must pay €25,000 a day ($32,500) until it removes all related content.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalb...2.htm?chan=globalbiz_europe_today's+top+story

 

[Bart]

Google settled with some of the parties involved, let's hope they'll find a solution for this too.

 

[Focus]

Too bad the belgian courts have no power over a US company! lol
..they won't have to pay anything most likely..

 

[BELLC1]

Maybe Google will payback by eliminating any Belgian TLD's, thereby causing other Belgians to protest these publishers. Just a thought. Never happen.

 

[typist]

Too bad the belgian courts have no power over a US company! lol
..they won't have to pay anything most likely..

even though the belgian market is currently served by googles dutch subsidiary ( http://www.google.be/contact.html ), I don't think ignoring belgian courts is a likely strategy for google...

 

[Sarcle]

This has already been reported here:

http://www.dnforum.com/showthread.php?t=209260

 

[Bart]

Maybe Google will payback by eliminating any Belgian TLD's, thereby causing other Belgians to protest these publishers. Just a thought. Never happen.

Well, that would be one hell of a business strategy
Maybe Google could punish its American customers too due to Viacom's copyright-claim then ?

 

[BELLC1]

Sure! Why not?!!!

btw, I lived in Florennes and Charleroi in the early 80's. If I ever got kicked out of the US, I'd move to Belgium or Holland.

 

[Dave Zan]

To be sure, Google News doesn't reproduce entire articles. Instead, it posts news summaries and includes links to the full articles on the original site. But the Belgian group argues that even Google's use of headlines and story summaries violates copyright law.

Looks like a potential "uh oh" moment.