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February 13, 2007

Today, a Brussels court said Google violated certain Belgian copyright laws by publishing links to newspapers in that country, but without proper permission. Additionally, the Court ordered Google to remove all links, setting a precedent for future cases in Europe.

Consequently, Google must pay 25,000 euros (US $32,500) per day until it removes all Belgian news content, the Court of First Instance ruled today in Belgium.

The Court said "there is no exception for Google in copyright law." Google said it has already removed all the content and will appeal the ruling soon.

This legal case may restrict how Web sites in Europe link to newspaper content. Copiepresse, a group representing French and German-language newspapers including La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, had sued Google for copyright infringement last year.

The journals claim they lose advertising revenue when Google uses snippets of articles and links directly to stories, circumventing ads on their sites, said Bruno Vandermeulen, a Brussels-based lawyer at Bird & Bird.

"It could definitely lead to potentially more lawsuits," said Vandermeulen, an intellectual property specialist. He added "I can imagine that other lawsuits will be filed against other content providers, such as YouTube," Google's video service.

The Belgian court ordered Google to remove articles, photos and graphics "from all its sites," including Google News and cached copies visible in search results.

"Google will have to reach a deal to make it worthwhile for newspapers to cooperate," said David Hooper, a newspaper lawyer and partner at Reynolds Porter Chamberlain in London. "There is a tendency for Google to use content for free and reach a deal later."

Bernard Magrez, a lawyer for Copiepresse who works for Eurothemis, said the daily fine imposed against Google today is retroactive for 139 days, to when the search engine was first asked to remove the content.

Also, Google will have to pay an additional 1,000 euros a day to other copyright groups, including SAJ, which represents journalists, if it fails to remove their content from its sites, the court ruled.

Yoram Elkaim, a lawyer for Google, said in Brussels today that the company was waiting for further clarification from the court about the fines.

As of this morning, Google' stock increased 0.4 percent to $460.27 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

In 2006, Google postponed plans for a Danish news site after newspapers complained. A year before that, the French news agency Agence France-Presse sued Google for linking to its content for free. Copiepresse has also threatened legal action against Microsoft and Yahoo if they continue to use their stories.

Google's YouTube, a video-sharing site, earlier in February agreed to remove more than 100,000 clips produced by New York-based Viacom after they were posted without permission.

Google and Copiepresse both said today that they were open for negotiations. "There's no animosity," said Philippe Nothomb, head of legal affairs of Rossel et Cie., which owns Belgium's most-read French daily, Le Soir. "We just don't want a win-lose situation."

"There's a real complementarity between these services" Google's Elkaim said. "This judgment doesn't stop us negotiating."

In January of last year, Google News was introduced in Belgium, showing headlines, photos and the first few lines of news stories with links to the full articles on the newspapers' Web sites. The case is part of a global drive by newspaper publishers to force search engines to pay for using their stories and pictures.

In 2006, the newspapers sued and won a court order that forced Google to remove all links to their content, or face a 1 million-euro daily fine.

Google's Elkaim said the company had complied with the September court order and removed said content as ordered.

Since the September ruling, the editors have maintained that some content is still on the system, visible using Google's cached links -- data that is saved on the search engine's own sites to allow quicker access.

Google argues that using headlines and text fragments with links to newspaper Web sites on Google News is legal. The Belgian newspaper editors, including Francois Le Hodey, CEO of La Libre Belgique, say their content creates "colossal traffic" for search engines, which is profitable only for them.

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Source: Bloomberg News