Today, European courts ruled that Google violated the copyright of Belgian newspaper publishers when it posted extracts from their stories on its Google News Website. The Belgian newspapers, represented by the trade group Copiepresse, claimed that Google unfairly profited by posting its articles on the web. The courts sided with the Belgian newspapers, saying that even Google wasn't exempt from copyright laws.
On the positive side, the court significantly reduced the daily fines that Google was required to pay for not removing the newspapers' content from its Web site, from almost $2 million per day to $33,543 per day.
Even though users must click through Google News to the newspaper's main site to read the full stories, Copierpresse believes they are still losing advertising revenue.
Sounds like greed to me.
Link:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128985/article.html
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2 comments:
This has much broader implications than are really touched on here: think of it in terms of Google losing a little, and everyone who reads Google news losing a lot. Now that the power is in the hands of the copyright owners, they take precedent in "protecting their information" and thus the flow of news and information on the internet is further impeded. This is the worst-case scenario, but it's not all-together out of the picture either. Let's just hope that most news agencies view Google news as a hit generator instead of copyright violator.
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