In early 2007, the Belgian press trade group Copiepresse won a court victory over Google News, which it accused of copyright violations because of the text excerpts and headlines used there by the search service. Although these excerpts fall under fair use in the US, copyright violation statutes differ elsewhere, and Google's actions were deemed to run afoul of those in Belgium. Feeling confident, Copiepresse apparently filed a similar suit against against a news aggregator run by the European Union itself. Despite the similarities in the cases, however, that suit has been tossed.
The initial ruling focused on a number of standard Google practices. These included saving cached copies of indexed material (although Google provides the technology to avoid this) and the use of text snippets and thumbnail images from the news stories as part of Google's own news site. As we initially noted, however, the problem may not have been so much the copyrighted material as the fact that Google's news aggregation service reduces the incentive for readers to find content through the newspapers' own ad-laden sites.
Since then, Copiepresse has managed to remain on good enough terms with the search giant to get its newspapers back in Google search (but not the news section). That detente may have come to an end a few weeks back, however, when the group demanded a huge fine for Google's past infringement. But the new case involving the EU may help establish the issue with more certainty.
