Google ordered to remove news items or pay $1 million euro a day fine

A Brussels court has ordered internet giant Google to pay 1 million euro a day if it does not remove all news articles and pictures from French and German language newspapers on its news site, Belgian media reported on Monday.
"The judgment, dating back to September 5, made public only yesterday (Sunday), says that Google provides texts after the publishers have taken them off their own websites," Flemish newspaper De Morgen reported.

The court considered this a breach of authors' rights, as well as Belgian law on databanks, the daily said.

If the ruling is not published on Google's Belgian website, the company will have to pay another half a million euro per day.

The suit against Google was filed by Belgian publishing group Copiepresse which represents various French and German language newspapers in the country.

In De Morgen, director of the Flemish Daily Press Alex Fordyn complained that often the fact that journalists and publishers have to be paid for their research is forgotten by those who advocate news should be free for everyone.

At the start of the conflict at the beginning of 2006, the Flemish Newspaper Association Reprocopy left news.google.be because it disagreed with the way the company operated.

Google had been informed of the decision of the Belgian court by Sept. 8 and can still appeal the ruling. SOURCE

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How do you guys feel about this?

I think it's great. Being a content producer and seeing Google Images and Google Video pisses me off. People go there to see what others have taken time to create, and only Google benefits. I think Google should have limited indexing.. like a few sentences of a story, low res images only that link directly to the page, not the way it does it now.

What are your thoughts?

Frankly, as far as news goes, I think that the news providers are missing the boat here if they're the ones making the complaints causing the judgements.

In the case of Google News, Google is taking maybe 25 or 30 words from each story (well within the doctrine of "fair use excerpts" in US copyright law), posting it on their site, and linking back to the websites of the stories.

I've personally learned of dozens of non-US news sources that I now read regularly, sources I would never have known about if not for Google News. Additionally, the website owner still gets all the revenue from the advertising page views when someone reads an article after seeing the headline and excerpt on Google News.

I'm less comfortable with Google Video, as it's a haven for copyright infringement, but as far as news goes, it's one of the best resources out there to read dozens (or hundreds) of different perspectives on a given story , many times from tiny local newspapers where the events actually occurred that may have more information or more in-depth reporting.

I hope that an equitable arrangement will be created so that Google News as we know it can be kept as is. It's a great resource that doesn't seem to harm anyone, and I'd hate to lose it.

All that it is going to mean to Google is that Belgian users wont be able to get any Belgian news via Google News.

Im pretty sure that Google will also keep the Belgian news articles on the rest of their global sites as this all seems to have stemmed from laws specifically relating to their Belgian site which one would assume has its offices located in that part of the world.

Regards,

Lee