A Belgium court has ruled that Googles News is breaking Belgium copyright law by syndicating news headlines and brief summaries from Belgium news website's. And ordered to pay Euros 25,000 per day.

The case was originally brought by Copiepresse (which represents many Belgium newspapers) in Sept 06, when a ruling was made to fine google Euros 1 million per day, which has now been reduced.

After google posted the September ruling other Belgium news agencies joined the bandwagon against google including Assucopie , Sofam , SAJ and Scam , SCAM ? Yes apparently a news agency called Scam as well, quite apt you would think.

All Belgium news agencies have done is exclude themselves from Google News , and thus making both google news Belgium less effective and also loss of traffic from google, therefore both are losers.

The whole point of search engines such as google news is that people click on search results to visit the content page. So what's next ? 'Old Europe' website's suing google search index for having their pages indexed ? Sounds ridiculous, but no more so than what the Belgium news agencies have done.

Perhaps the Belgium and French news agencies should search for robots.txt, which explains how to exclude their content from search engines, instead of trying it on.

Already other news agencies of 'old europe' are looking to this verdict as a reason for filing their own law suits against Google. Notably AFP of France.

Comments

defcon1
17 Feb 07, 14:42

Re: Old Europe does Battle with Google - As Belgium court rules against Google News

Regardsless of the traffic that google drives to websites, they do have a point though, that google is making profits from their content without sharting that profit ! NO royalties etc...

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