Google is not only publishing headlines, but making them, for all the wrong reasons. The most powerful search engine on the World Wide Web is being asked to pay 49 million euros ($76 million) in damages to Belgian newspapers for publishing and storing their content without requesting permission.

In 2007 Google lost a lawsuit filed by a conglomerate of Belgian newspapers and it had to remove their news articles published on Google News and saved them in its search engine cache without the copyright holders’ approval.

The group representing the media conglomerate, Copiepresse, said it had summoned Google to appear before a Brussels court in September to decide on the claim. The newspaper copyright group called on the search engine to pay a provisional 4 million euros ($6 million).

Google, which has challenged that ruling, said that it had not received the new Copiepresse legal summons yet and still awaits the outcome of its appeal.

This is not the first time Google is accused of copyright infringement. In 2005 Agence France Presse demanded it removed all its headlines, intros and pictures from Google News and pay $17.5 million in damages.

A year later, Google signed a licensing deal with the Associated Press but denied doing so to avoid yet another lawsuit.

Some analysts, however, believe these court cases will not make Google lose its sleep. Hamilton Faber, an analyst with Atlantic Equities, told Forbes.com: “From Google’s point of view, the copyright case is important. But it generates about $1.0 billion in free cash flow every quarter. This amounts no particular material damage.”

“Service providers immediately try to reject any relationship with Google, but I think can benefit a lot from it,” Faber said.

source: www.forbes.com

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Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp. and The Wall Street Journal, says Google and Yahoo are giant copyright scofflaws that steal the news.

"The question is, should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyright ... not steal, but take," Murdoch says. "Not just them, but Yahoo."

But whether search-engine news aggregation is theft or a protected fair use under copyright law is unclear, even as Google and Yahoo profit tremendously from linking to news. So maybe Murdoch is right.

Murdoch made his comments late Thursday during an address at the Cable Show, an industry event held in Washington. He seemingly was blaming the web, and search engines, for the news media's ills.

"People reading news for free on the web, that's got to change," he said.


Real estate magnate Sam Zell made similar comments in 2007 when he took over the Tribune Company and ran it into bankruptcy.

We suspect Zell and Murdoch are just blowing smoke. If they were not, perhaps they could demand Google and Yahoo remove their news content. The search engines would kindly oblige.

Better yet, if Murdoch and Zell are so set on monetizing their web content, they should sue the search engines and claim copyright violations in a bid to get the engines to pay for the content.

The outcome of such a lawsuit is far from clear.

It's unsettled whether search engines have a valid fair use claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The news headlines are copied verbatim, as are some of the snippets that go along.

Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that "There's not a rock-solid ruling on the question."

Should the search engines pay up for the content? Tell us what you think.

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