Google appeals Belgian copyright ruling
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Blog: Company is also in talks with the group that has sued it, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
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Google reached a settlement with Belgian photographers and journalists Friday in a copyright dispute over how Google News links to newspaper content.
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BRUSSELS/LONDON  - Google Inc. GOOG.O has lost a   bid to overturn a Belgian court order that requires it to   publish an earlier ruling forbidding it from reproducing   article snippets on its news amalgamation service.
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(InfoWorld) - Google is facing mounting protests from newspaper publishers in Europe, the impact of which could ultimately affect the amount of content available to end users through search engines. The company is due to appear in court on Friday morning to dobattle with the Belgian press, which filed aÂ lawsuit earlier this year accusing Google of copyright infringement for the way it posts headlines and snippets of their news stories on Google News. Meanwhile, in the past two weeks trouble has also stirred up elsewhere. The company was forced to put on hold the launch of its Google News Web site in Denmark last week after newspapers there demanded a system that would allow them to "opt in" to Google's service, rather than having their content trawled automatically, said Holger Rosendal, head of the legal department at the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association. And a Norwegian media group has written to the search giant, objecting to the way that Google posts thumbnails of its members' news photos. "According to Norwegian copyright law, you are not allowed to use photos without permission from the rights holder, so that's the big issue here," said Pernelle Borset, associate director of the Norweigan Media Businesses' Association. The protests highlight mounting concern among some publishers that Google has gone beyond a simple search service to become a powerful media company that profits from the content of others. Publishers of news, books and other content types have filed lawsuits, often charging copyright infringement, to force Google to seek permission before using their work and even provide them with compensation. Google responds that it acts within the law because it posts only snippets of publishers' content, and because the publishers can opt out easily. It notes that it drives traffic to publishers' Web sites, since it links to their publications, and it can help publicize works that might not otherwise be found. Moreover, it says, if search engines were forced to get permission from every site they indexed, search services would not be able to operate at all. "If content isn't indexed, it can't be searched. And if it can't be searched, how can it be found?" asked David Eun, Google vice president for content partnerships, in a Google blog post . "Imagine a library with no index of titles or subjects of the books on its shelves, or no catalogue of the authors who wrote them." But that, critics say, is the point. Google is not a public service like a library, it is a profit-seeking company. Google may not "aggressively monetize" Google News with advertisements, but the site attracts visitors to Google, and visitors mean money. "The exceptions (for fair use) don't really cover what is in effect a commercial service, and that's where they are vulnerable," said Laurence Kaye, a lawyer in the U.K. who is advising the newspaper industry on copyright issues. Google isn't the only company targeted. Copiepresse, the group representing Belgian newspapers, also sent a cease and desist letter to Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division, which promptly removed the Belgian newspapers from its Web site rather than become embroiled in a lawsuit. Copiepresse has said that it may sue others. The outcomes of the various lawsuits, also brought in the U.S. by Agence France Press, the Authors Guild and others, will shape how Google and other search engines can index and display copyright material on their Web sites. For users, they will determine whether search engines continue to give them easy access to such a wide variety of content. Google lost an initial ruling against Copiepresse in September and was forced to remove the newspapers' content from its Belgian search site and from Google News. Google was not present at the hearing, however, apparently because of an administrative error on Google's part. On Friday -- assuming it shows up -- it will defend itself for the first time. The outcome could affect more than Google News. Copiepresse argues that by indexing and caching its members' content, Google is effectively making copies of the works for a commercial purpose, which it says is a copyright violation. It also objects to Google using the material without first asking permission. Those arguments could be applied to other types of content. Search engines index and cache masses of copyright work on the Web without first asking permission. If the Court of First Instance in Brussels upholds its initial judgment, it could make it difficult for search engines in Belgium to operate at all. "The ruling right now means that search engines can't operate in Belgium, because you don't have the right to index copyright pages without explicit permission," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of SearchEngineWatch.com. A favorable ruling for Copiepresse could inspire other copyright holders to seek redress and potentially influence how other European countries apply copyright law to search engines. A decision is not expected for some weeks, and Google has also filed an appeal. Google declined to comment on the possible ramifications of the case, but it acknowledged its significance in a posting to the Google blog: "We do feel that this case raises important and complex issues. It goes to the heart of how search engines work," wrote Rachel Whetstone, Google's director of European corporate communications and public affairs. Europe does not have a blanket "fair use" law as the U.S. does, which allows organizations to use content in a limited way without prior permission. Courts typically consider whether the use of the copyright work is commercial, how much of it is used, and what effect the use may have on its value. It was unclear whether other newspapers will file similar lawsuits. Many -- probably most -- go out of their way to be listed on Google News because of the traffic it drives to their Web sites. Google News is a "powerful traffic generator," said Rusty Coats, general manager of TBO.com, the Web site of Florida's Tampa Tribune. The paper gets about 15 percent of its traffic from search engines, he said, although that can jump to 50 percent when there is a hurricane in the area. "The fact that (Google) also gains from increased traffic I see as a kind of levy. Rebelling against that cuts my own throat," Coats said. "Nothing is 100 percent positive, but (Google) is not evil, either." Sullivan, at SearchEngineWatch, said the Belgian papers were able to "band together and force Google's hand" because they operate in a small market. Such action would be more difficult in a larger market, he said, such as the U.S. He criticized the action by Copiepresse, saying it could have opted out of Google's search but instead chose to litigate. "The intention seems to be that they want to be listed in Google, and they want them to share a portion of the profits." But Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, said there is wide sympathy in the industry for Copiepresse. "There's a huge consensus among newspapers that the current situation is not sustainable," she said. While some papers will opt for lawsuits, she said, many favor a technology solution that will give them more control. EPC is helping develop a technology called the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), an "opt in" system that will give newspapers more control over how their content is used. Google has offered to join the ACAP initiative but wants the protocol to be based on robots.txts -- a technology widely used by Web publishers to stop their sites from being indexed by search engines -- and not be an entirely new technology, Whetstone said. Meanwhile, it's clear that Google has to better educate publishers. "Clearly, newspapers are upset, but they also have a lot of mistaken assumptions," Sullivan said. For example, Google signed a deal to pay the Associated Press for stories. Other newspapers have been irritated by what appears to be special treatment, Sullivan said. In fact, Google says it plans to use the AP content in a way that goes "beyond the limited uses permitted by copyright laws," possibly for a new service, although it hasn't said how. Other publishers think closer partnerships with search engines could be mutually beneficial. Just this week, several big newspaper chains in the U.S. announced a deal to post classified advertisements and other content on Yahoo Web sites. The goal is to drive traffic to both Yahoo and the newspapers. Google is still primarily a technology company, and technology is something that newspapers are sometimes "horrendously bad at," the Tampa Tribune's Coats said. That opens the door to partnerships, in which publishers take advantage of Google's advertisers and open programming interfaces, for example, while Google makes more creative use of their content using technologies such as RSS feeds, he said. In the meantime, Google may simply have to exclude newspapers and other content providers that it cannot come to terms with, said Andrew Girdwood, head of technical search at BigMouthMedia, a U.K. search optimization company. "Their stated objective is to index all of the world's information," he said. "But there's not really a newspaper that the world couldn't live without." There may, however, be whole countries that Google would rather not live without. Â
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After initially refusing to comply with a court order in Belgium to publish on its homepage the decision of a case that demanded it to stop linking to Belgian newspapers without their consent, Google has relented. The company's once sparse homepage now contains the court order at the bottom.
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A Belgian court has ordered US Internet search giant Google to stop reproducing articles, photos and graphics from French- and German-language Belgian newspapers on its news site.
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A Belgian court dealt a blow to Google by ruling against the US Internet giant in a copyright case lodged by French-language Belgian newspapers and closely watched by other media.
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Google responded on Friday to a lawsuit filed against it by Northeastern University, denying claims that its search service infringes on patented technology.Google denied all charges in the suit, which was&#160;filed jointly by Northeastern, of Boston, and a search technology company called Jarg, of Waltham, Mass. Google also filed a counterclaim asking the court to dismiss the patent as invalid.The&#160;suit was filed in November&#160;in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks an injunction preventing Google from further infringement, as well as royalty payments and damages.The patent in question describes a distributed database system that breaks queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster search results.The plaintiffs say that Google uses this system to run its search engine, and that the system was invented by Kenneth Baclawski, an associate professor at Northeastern and one of Jarg&#39;s founders. Northeastern was awarded a patent for the system, which it has licensed exclusively to Jarg.In its response Friday, Google argued that the patent is invalid and should not have been awarded in the first place. It cites various sections of U.S. patent law, including those that deal with the novelty of an invention and prior art. It also cites the doctrine of &quot;laches,&quot; which essentially requires plaintiffs to file lawsuits in a timely manner.Its counterclaim asks the court to declare the patent invalid and unenforceable.Both parties have requested a jury trial, and legal experts have said the case could be resolved in 18 months to two years.The U.S. patent, number 5,694,593, is dated Dec. 2, 1997, and can be viewed by searching the Web site of the U.S. Patent &amp; Trademark Office. U.S. patent law is also described on the USPTO Web site in this PDF file. Google&#39;s reply cites sections 101, 102, 103, and 112.
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Google Inc.  is refusing to  post a copy of a Belgian legal ruling against it on its local  Web site, and is asking the court to annul that provision of  the case and the daily fines associated with it.
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Yahoo! has lost an appeal against a US district courtâs ruling which said that the company does not have to obey a French courtâs decision requiring it to block French citizens from accessing internet auctions of Nazi memorabilia at Yahoo!
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Lawyers for Belgium's French-speaking newspapers and Internet search engine Google clashed in court, during a hearing into a copyright case against the US giant.
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A Belgian court has ordered Internet search company Google Inc. to stop publishing content from Belgian newspapers without permission or payment of fees, a Belgian press association said Monday.
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A film studio owned by technology and  media entrepreneur Mark Cuban asked a U.S. federal court to  force Google Inc. to identify people who put its copyrighted  videos on Google Video and YouTube, Cuban said on Wednesday.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc. refused to comply yesterday with a Belgian court decision that required the company to publish the original text of the ruling on its sites, calling that requirement ``unnecessary" and ``disproportionate."
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Google needs to deal with its Viacom lawsuit before the industry can move forward on copyright protection.
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A federal appeals court handed Google a setback in a patent fight on Wednesday, tossing out part of a summary judgment in Google's favor in a lawsuit filed by Hyperphrase Technologies, LLC.
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Internet search engine Google Inc. said Monday it was weighing a possible appeal after a Paris court ordered it to pay 200,000 euros (&#36;260,000) plus costs to luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton for breach of trademark.