Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2006/09/22/google_loses_news_appeal/
Google loses Belgian news appeal
Don't publish and .be damned
Posted in Legal, 22nd September 2006 15:45 GMT
Google has lost its appeal to Belgian courts to ditch part of the ruling in a copyright case against its news service which it lost earlier this month.
The case was brought by newspaper group Copiepress, which said Google News should have asked its permission and agreed financial terms.
In the original judgment, the court ordered Google to publish the full judgment on its site. Google didn't fancy that much, whining that the publicity the case had attracted rendered it unneccesary.
Today an appeal against the 5 September decision was rejected. Google will be fined €500,000 for each day the judgment goes unpublished.
It said it will appeal again as part of a wider attempt to overturn Copiepress' victory in November. The search engine has always maintained Google News does not trip any copyright legislation.
In other news, increasingly frustrated by Google's copyright-infringing plot to index everything in the world ever, publishers will trial a system which should avoid messy legal wrangling in future.
The World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the European Publishers Council (EPC), the International Publishers Association (IPA), and the European Newspapers Association (ENPA), represent media organisations around the globe. A pilot of Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) - a technology for granting permissions - was announced today.
EPC chairman Francisco Pinto Balsemão said: "ACAP will unambiguously express our preferred rights and terms and conditions. In doing so, it will facilitate greater access to our published content, making it more, not less available, to anyone wishing to use it, while avoiding copyright infringement and protecting search engines from future litigation."
More details on ACAP should emerge in October. ®