Google recently failed to secure the “Gmail” name in a few European countries, this time they have lost again and once more it is Europe. Copyright is the issue this time, it has to do with the fact that Google reproduces news from other sources on it’s own pages.

I just had to talk about this because the country that launched the legal action was Belgium. For those that don’t know that is where co-host Paladin Knightwise is from. So what is the deal? The deal is that a group of 17 Belgian newspapers sued Google for reproduction of their content. Google counter claimed “fair use” and that they linked back to the original material. The court ruled in favour of the group due to the fact that the search engine cached links and content available for free that the newspapers would usually sell. They have demanded that Google remove all such links and material. Of course Google have appealed.

Copiepresse (the 17 strong group of papers) stated that the ruling could well set a precedent in other countries such as Norway, Austria and Italy having spoken to them. Google of course are worried and that is obvious by their response in which they just claimed that was false and that every country is different. Although at this time the ruling only affects Google.be according to Google representatives.

If Google do not comply with the court they are up for $32,000 per day. Legal representation for the newspapers say that the ruling also affects other versions, I am assuming that they mean other Google domains and not just .be. If this is the case then Google could be up for 4.3 million per day! They say that the ruling covers all Google domains and all content owned by the papers should be removed from every one.

Followed by more legal mumbo jumbo. But what stands out like proverbial dog’s you know what… is this huge clash of media. In one corner we have print. They don’t want their Newspapers being accessed for free. Then you have Google, the electronic scraper of the universe indexing all kinds of media. Print, blogs, video, newspapers, RSS feeds the lot. Most people would be stoked if their content was indexed by Google for their news service. The clash is a fight of the dying and birthing media. Newspapers will die one day. I have said before that if they do not evolve then in time they are dead.

People are changing, culture is changing media is changing. Some media is not changing with it. This is the news here. Not the fact that it is Google. Indeed other search engines are under the same scrutiny from similar services. The fact is that Newspapers want people to buy newspapers. Problem is that not everybody wants newspapers anymore. They are fighting a loosing battle.

Via: globeandmail.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 9:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.