A Belgian tussle for Google

A Belgian court has ordered Google to remove articles from French-language newspapers from the Belgian version of Google News.

A group representing French- and German-language press in Belgium filed the copyright complaint against the site, arguing that Google did not get permission to reprint the copy. The ruling, issued earlier this month, would levy a daily fine of $1.3 million (1 million euros) if the search giant does not comply on Monday, Reuters reported.

Google has faced similar complaints about its news service from the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse. Bloggers argued this week that the Belgian suit is foolish, and that newspapers don't understand that the Google News service would be bringing them more traffic. (To be fair, many bloggers didn't understand that Belgium does not operate under U.S. copyright law.)

Blog community response:

"One of these days, perhaps, both courts and publishers will learn that having someone link to you is a good thing, especially when it's a site that people go to in order to look for exactly the type of content you produce."
--TechDirt

"And if Copiepresse disagreed with all that, it seems instead of going to court they could've simply put up a 'robots.txt' file disallowing the Google bot from spidering their content..."
--Google Blogoscoped

"Why interesting? Because there's a number of precedents to show that, because the web is available to anyone anywhere, litigants can now indulge in a spot of forum shopping by bringing their copyright cases against Google in the Belgian courts."
--Virtual Economics