The Fight Continues
Posted by jonathan at 3:13pm EST on 10/27/2006
Google’s legal problems are far from being over. They are still battling it out in the courts with the Belgium newspapers.
The case focused on Google’s news aggregation service, which automatically scans the websites of newspapers, extracting headlines and snippets of text from each story. These are displayed at Google News and the headlines link users to the full stories on the source sites. Newspaper group Copiepresse, which represents leading Belgian, French and German publications, said this amounted to copyright infringement and a breach of database rules because its members had not been asked for permission.
Google’s problem is that they did in fact infringe upon copyrights. I’ve had users take my content before, but I don’t have the legal team to back me up and fight about it. Stealing is stealing. As much as I love Google, I do believe they were in the wrong on this one.
