In August Google was sued by an organization called Copiepresse, which represents a number of newspapers in Belgium. It argued that the Google search engine and news site breached these publications’ copyright.
Recently, a court ruled in favor of Copiepresse and ordered Google to remove these publishers’ content from both Google.be and Google News. The court also required Google to post its ruling to the home pages of Google.be and Google News Belgium.
The decision of the court is due to be reconsidered in November.
Interesting questions are raised by this case … does this mean you should never reference text from another website explicitly?
Typically a Google web search will reveal a snippet of the item and a link to the originating source requiring a user to visit the original website to view the full article. There are techniques available (robots.txt) that prevent indexing of content.
I wonder if any of these newspapers have an RSS headline feed? Does content published in this way become public domain?
In a somewhat related case, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) have been fighting Google in court since March 2005 over indexing its news content. (This is possibly because the AFP have a deal in place with sites such as Yahoo! News to license and carry its articles).
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