A Belgian court ruled against Google’s use of newspaper stories in September 2006, though Google claimed ignorance of the event.
Since then the parties have returned to court where the matter was further examined. See website articles for more in day or so.
What is of interest here are the arguments of breach of copyright and how Google operates.
Google’s news service automatically scans the website of newspapers and extracts snippets of text and headlines. These are displayed at Google News and the headlines link users to the full stories on the source sites. Copiepresse acting for a number of press organisations has argued this amounts to breach of copyright and a breach of database rules since its press members had not permitted such use. Copiepresse still wants the traffic but wants Google to pay for this, something Google is loath to do.
The court ruled that Google’s cache also infringed copyright. With Google, search results are displayed on the third party site and also on a link to a “cached “copy of the same page stored at Google’s own site which say the Belgians undermine their own members archive sales. Why pay for an archived search if you can Google this and get it for free?
Googlebot, an automated programme, trawls the web for content and archives these as copies in its index by breaking down the text and providing the Google search with a summary.
It is possible to block Google or other search robots by way of robots exclusion standard (/robots.txt) or “NOARCHIVE” added to the end website page url.
Copiepresse did not do this because they said that excused Google from an illegal act and this argument has occurred subsequently with WAN (The World Association Of Newspapers) which represents 18,000 newspapers in 102 countries.
Copiepresse hoped that if enough publishers withdraw their content Google will lose content to index and this will force it to share some of its $10 billion per annum spoils.
Copiepresse argued Google is illegally cutting them out of their right to archive revenue which Google provides for free.
Google argued however as an intermediary it had the right to cache material by way of The Copyright Directive and E-Commerce Directive.
A Nevada court thought differently when it ruled against an opponent of Google-a lawyer-who set a trap for Google and who then sued. Having written content knowing it would be cached a claim was made but here the court ruled that the Google opt-out method was valid in that jurisdiction since the conduct of the lawyer in failing to active the robots protocol amounted to consent of a licence for Google to use.
As such Google may argue the implied opt-out licence argument in future. It also runs the argument that snippets may be published from the results by Google News without infringing copyright law as the snippets are not “substantial”-something that Copiepresse denies as copyright does protect musical snippets and jingles for instance.
