Google Loses Newspaper Copyright Case in Belgium

According to The Globe and Mail:

"A Brussels court ruled in favour of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine's "cached" links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis. It ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites — including Google News — that it displays without the newspapers' permission. But in the future, it said it would be up to copyright owners to get in touch with Google by e-mail to complain if the site was posting content that belonged to them."

Google says they will appeal, but it seems to me that in this case, the publishers are right. I've gone to the mat for Google (in the context of book search) to defend their fair use right to present snippets (Previous Radar Coverage), but Google needs to find ways to search content behind pay walls. If Google's caching gets around those limits, they should figure out how to work that issue. We know from Google Scholar that they have the means to do so.

As publishers build their own book repositories, Google will need to do the same for book search -- index the content and provide snippets, but serve the actual content through the publisher's site, which may include requirements for payment or other access control. (See Book Search Should Work Like Web Search) It may be that making the content freely available and/or ad supported is a better mechanism, but the content creator should be free to make that choice. Google should provide mechanism, not policy (as Bob Schiefler used to say about the X Window System.)

That being said, the court's judgment can hardly be in the interest of the publishers: "It ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites." Once the links disappear, the sites will feel the pain. Most of us get a huge amount of our inbound traffic from Google. The right answer is to respect the paywalls, not to take the stuff out of Google entirely.

This is the problem with court judgments and legislation: it often creates collateral damage.