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Belgian News Dropped From Google News

A Belgian court found Google, Inc. in violation of the country's copyright laws and ordered the search giant to remove all links to French and German-language newspaper reports published in Belgium. The legal action, taken by a consortium of local publishers in Belgium, marks the latest attempt by the news media to challenge the growing power of Internet news portals run by large search engines. Publishers complain that Google News steals ad revenue from newspapers by publishing summaries of articles along with a link to the newspapers' Web sites. The consortium, called Copiepresse, argued that the Google News summaries keep users from reading actual stories. The Belgian Court of First Finance ruled against the Mountain View, Calif. Web company, and said that failure to remove all material from Google News would result in daily fines of $1 million euros. Google News offers headlines and no more than a few lines of text, not the full summaries the Belgian news agencies complained about. "I hope this is a trend," said Pierre Louette, president of Agence France-Presse, a French news agency, which brought separate legal actions against Google last year. Ominously for Google, Louette pointed out that Belgian copyright law is "very similar" to European Union copyright. Now, what about U.S. copyright law? News and data aggregation have become big business in the U.S. Google said it intends to appeal the Belgian court's decision.

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