Google News to appeal Belgian copyright decision
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Name 10 famous Belgian legal precedents Google will challenge a Belgian court ruling against Google News, worried the judgement might set a precedent which could impinge on its role as a content aggregator and the online advertising sold on the back of it.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Google took another step in its continued attempts to improve its relationships with wire services Friday when it announced a program to host full articles from news agencies on Google News pages. Google News, a site in which Google aggregates links to articles published on news outlets' Web sites, is generally valued by publishers who make money from online advertising and as such benefit from the traffic Google News sends to their sites. But Google News has been a tougher sell for wire services, which generally make money by licensing their content to newspapers and magazines and not by attracting readers to their own Web sites. Agence France Presse , one of the world's largest wire services, sued GoogleÂ for alleged copyright infringement on the News site. Although never publicly acknowledged, it's widely believed that the Associated Press threatened to file a similar lawsuit. Although Google maintains that running hyperlinked headlines, text snippets, and thumbnail images from news outlets in Google News is protected by the fair use principle,Â it eventually settled with AFPÂ and signed a licensing agreement with it, as well as with AP. Friday's announcement appears to be the first concrete result of those licensing agreements, although the AP deal is now more than a year old. The AFP settlement and agreement were announced in April. Now, if they want, people will be able to read the original articles from AP, AFP, the U.K. Press Association, and the Canadian Press in Google News pages. Google also entered into licensing agreements with the U.K. and Canadian wire services. Previously, because wire services' Web sites typically feature either a small sample or none of their stories, the way to read their articles was go to the sites of their syndication clients, such as newspapers. The new feature unveiled Friday is called "duplicate detection," which lets Google News identify the original source of a story that may appear in tens or hundreds of news outlet Web sites. If the source story is from one of the four news service agencies that Google has licensing agreements with, Google will display the story on a page that it hosts. But the feature will benefit all types of news outlets, not just wire services. For example, if a New York Times story gets syndicated, Google News will know that it originally came from that newspaper. For such outlets that have their own public Web sites, "duplicate detection" will simply let users click over to their sites, which is the traditional Google News model. Removing duplicated articles opens up more room on Google News, leading to a better user experience, said Josh Cohen, Google News business product manager. "Our goal with what we're launching today is to provide the best experience for our users and help our partners get credit for their content," he said. Asked whether the hosting of full articles on Google News will weaken the fair-use protection claim, Cohen said that it will not. "We respect copyright laws. When we go beyond fair use, we enter into licensing agreements," he said. The "duplicate detection" feature is already operational on the site, he said.
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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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Speculation is rife that Google announcements will include a local version of YouTube for European countries.
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Google said it was disappointed with the ruling that it violated copyright laws and that it planned to file a further appeal.
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(InfoWorld) - Media company Viacom said on Tuesday that it was filing suit against Google Inc. for what it alleges are "massive intentional copyright infringement" of Viacomâs property. Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages and asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to place an injunction on Google and to prevent the company from sharing around 160,000 unauthorized video clips on the company's YouTube video sharing site, Viacom said in a statement. Google was not immediately available for comment. Viacom, which owns popular brands including MTV, Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon, said its programming had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times on YouTube, the video sharing site that Google purchased in October, 2006, for $1.6 billion. âYouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to othersâ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom said in a statement.Â  "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws." The suit by Viacom follows a notice from Viacom in February, 2007 under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to remove its videos from YouTube. Viacom alleges that Google does little to police copyright violations on YouTube. "This behavior stands in stark contrast to the actions of other significant distributors, who have recognized the fair value of entertainment content and have concluded agreements to make content legally available to their customers around the world," the company said. Shortly after buying YouTube in October, Google struck deals with Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group to offer music videos on YouTube and share advertising revenue. The company also negotiated with Viacom on a similar deal, but Viacom claims those negotiations were unproductive and that Google is following an "unlawful business model." "Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused," Viacom said.
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Google Inc. on Saturday published on  its Belgian website a court order which forbids the Internet  search engine to reproduce snippets of Belgian press on its  news amalgamation service.
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Thats the $64,000 question now that a court in Belgium ruled that the search engine company violated that nation's copyright laws.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. has reached an agreement with two groups representing authors and photographers in Belgium that had objected to the way the company indexes and displays their content on its Google News Web site. The agreements with Sofam, which says it represents 3,700 photographers, and Scam, which represents 20,000 writers, mark the first steps by Google in resolving a copyright lawsuit that forced it to remove French- and German-language Belgian newspaper content from its Web site. On Friday, a judge in Brussels heard arguments in that case, filed by a group of newspaper publishers, Copiepresse. Sofam (SociÃ©tÃ© MultimÃ©dia des Auteurs des Arts Visuels) and Scam (SociÃ©tÃ© Civile des Auteurs Multimedia) were among several smaller groups that had joined Copiepresse in its legal action. "We reached an agreement with Sofam and Scam that allows us to make extensive use of their content," Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell said on Monday. The agreement allows Google to use content from the groups in "new ways" that "go beyond what copyright law allows," she said. She declined to say if Google is paying the groups or to provide further details. Google has signed a deal to use content from the Associated Press newswire that it described in similar language. Copiepresse has complained that Google violates its members' copyrights by indexing their content and displaying it on Google News without asking permission. Google says the use is legitimate because it shows only a snippet of news stories, and because it directs users to the publications' Web sites to read the full story. On Friday, the judge in Brussels said she would give her verdict in the case early next year. Google News has also run into trouble in Scandinavia, where it launched two weeks ago. The company delayed the introduction of the news service in Denmark after publishers there objected to having to "opt out" if they didn't want their content displayed on Google's Web site. And a publishing group in Norway has protested the use of its members' news photographs, which it says is not permitted under Norwegian copyright law. Google has declined to comment on talks with any particular publishing groups, but says it is open to discussions to resolve disputes. Â
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Google Inc. lost an appeal Friday of a Belgian court's requirement that the Internet search company publish on its home page the ruling in a recent case it lost.
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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.
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Google has been ordered by a Belgian court to stop reproducing news articles from papers within the country for Google News. If other courts follow suit, one of the most popular services for the company outside of search could be in jeopardy.
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(InfoWorld) - A court has ruled that the Belgian ISP Scarlet ExtendedÂ is responsible for blocking illegal file-sharing on its network, setting a precedent that could affect other ISPs in Europe, according to a recording industry group. Belgium's Court of First Instance has given the Internet service provider six months to install technology to prevent its customers from sharing pirated music and video files, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said. If it fails to do so it will be fined â¬2,500 ($3,400) per day, according to the ruling, published June 29. The music industry has long sought to hold ISPs responsible for illegal file-sharing on their networks, although in the U.S. it has been largely unsuccessful. ISPs have argued that they provide a service like a post office or a telephone company, and shouldn't be required to police the traffic on their networks. The Brussels ruling is based on Belgium's interpretation of the European Union's Information Society Directive, often called the E.U. copyright directive, and as such could set a precedent for other cases in Europe, the IFPI said. "The court has confirmed that the ISPs have both a legal responsibility and the technical means to tackle piracy. This is a decision that we hope will set the mold for government policy and for courts in other countries in Europe and around the world," IFPI Chairman and CEO John Kennedy said in a statement. The case stems from a lawsuit filed against the ISP TiscaliÂ by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers, known as SABAM. Tiscali later sold its Belgian operation to Scarlet Belgie Holding, and the former Tiscali business became Scarlet Extended. The ruling appears to apply only to the Belgian service and not to Tiscali. Neither company could immediately be reached for comment, and it was unclear if Scarlet planned to appeal the ruling. SABAM said it won a preliminary judgment in the case 2004, and the Belgian court assigned an expert to study the technical options ISPs can use to prevent illegal file sharing. It came up with seven, including a system from Audible Magic that creates a "digital fingerprint" for each copyright work and blocks their delivery over networks.
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Internet search engine Google has been accused of censoring the Chinese news service that it launched two weeks ago. Web hosting company Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) reported that Google&#39;s Chinese news
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By Stephen Castle  One of Google's most popular services came under threat yesterday when a court banned the search engine from reproducing articles from Belgian newspapers and opened the door to similar challenges elsewhere in Europe.
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Waterloo for Google News in November Google has finally complied with a court order that it must publish the judgment in a copyright case it lost against Belgian newspaper group Copiepress.â¦
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A Belgian Internet service provider has appealed a ruling that it must block illegal file-sharing on its network in a case that tests two European Union directives concerning copyright and the extent of responsibility that ISPs have for transmitted content.