http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117135913092807050.html
(From BNA Internet News)
Belgian Court Says Google Violated Copyright Law
Associated Press
Word Count: 622 | Companies Featured in This Article: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- A court on Tuesday ruled in favor of Belgian newspapers that sued Google Inc., claiming that the Web search leader infringed copyright laws and demanded it remove their stories.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company that operates the world's most-used search engine immediately said it would appeal, claiming its Google News service was "entirely legal."
A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine's "cached" links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.
It ordered Google to ...
1 comment:
From Google's official Blog
(http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/about-copiepresse-decision.html):
Today's ruling does not affect the current content of Google News because the websites represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from Google News. In fact, hundreds of news publishers in Belgium and around the world are delighted to be included in Google News because it helps more people find their websites and read their articles. That's why Google receives far more requests for inclusion than requests for removal.
We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content. These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines. In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index—all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.
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