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May 28, 2008
Belgian Newspapers Want $77.5 million in Damages from Google
A Belgian newspaper group has filed a suit asking for $77.5 million in damages from Google. The group, Copiepresse, claims Google has violated copyright law by publishing their pages on Google News and caching pages from their websites.
Copiepresse first brought a suit in 2006 and The Court of First Instance in Brussels sided with the newspaper group. Google has appealed, but removed the pages from its News and main search sites.
But Google began indexing the pages on its main site again, which drove Copiepresse to bring its latest suit. Google maintains that its search products are legal.
What do you think of Copiepresse's lawsuits? Think they should just slap a robots.txt file on their site? Tell us how it is in the comments.
Posted by Nathania Johnson at May 28, 2008 10:26 AM
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Comments
That's an interesting point. I think most people would think that if another site reposted their content that would be a clear breach of copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but I know about the Berne copyright convention where (for the US) almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a copyright notice or not.
Google caching pretty much lifts your entire site and copies it to their servers. And for a newspaper (or any internet entity) they change their content daily, hourly, even by the minute. They also retract stories that are inaccurate. For a newspaper, this may then be even a more critical broach.
Posted by: Wangzen at May 28, 2008 6:25 PM
Google duplicating content from other sites??? never!! :)
I think the Belgian news paper has a claim here as Google are taking their content which means that people no longer needs to go to the Belgian newspaper site to view the article. I have enough trouble trying to out rank a .gov.au imagine competing with Google.com for a search on one of your own articles!
Posted by: Del Boy at May 29, 2008 2:18 AM
There are lots off ways to prevent Google indexing the articles.
If they don't know how that works they don't deserve to have any visitor at all.
Atm it's 2008 not 1908.
Posted by: PAscal at June 4, 2008 6:44 AM
