Google buckles in Belgian copyright wrangle

Waterloo for Google News in November

By Chris Williams • Get more from this author

Posted in Financial News, 25th September 2006 10:25 GMT

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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.

The firm was facing a fine of €500,000 per day if it failed to make the ruling public. Despite this, Google said it would not play ball after it lost an appeal against the publishing order on Friday. It claimed the case had already attracted enough publicity.

A full appeal against the case will go ahead in November. A Google spokesman said the change of tack in publishing the original ruling would allow it to move on to the wider battle against Copiepress.

Earlier this month the publisher of La Derniére Heure, La Libre Belgique and Le Soir successfully argued that Google News Belgium infringed its copyright by republishing snippets of it newspapers' content without permission.

The ruling can be read in French here at google.be. For an English translation, Babel Fish does a decent job on the judgment. Babel Fish is here. Simply stick google.be into the URL field.

Be quick though, Google is only required to display its telling-off for five days. ®

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