• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, February 14, 2007

A court in Belgium ruled Tuesday that Google violated the copyright of several newspapers by displaying headlines and snippets of articles, and by offering links to cache files of the material.

But the Belgian ruling doesn't set a precedent in the United States, where Google also faces several copyright infringement lawsuits. In addition, some lawyers maintain that Google has stronger legal arguments in the United States, where the First Amendment gives companies more leeway to publish material they don't own.

The Belgian case was brought by Copiepresse, representing a coalition of 17 newspapers that complained that Google News displayed headlines, first sentences and photos without the newspapers' permission. The newspapers also argued that Google Search violated their copyrights by providing links to cache files of articles, which users could click on in lieu of paying for the material.

Google intends to ask an appellate court to overturn the decision. "Google is disappointed and we intend to appeal the ruling because we believe that Google.be and Google News are entirely legal and provide great value and critical information to Internet users," said Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes. He also said Google honors companies' requests to refrain from including their results from its pages, and will continue to do so.

The Belgian court last September ordered Google to remove the content at issue. Tuesday, the court said it would fine Google $32,500 a day for each day it violated the ruling, but Google maintains it has followed the September order. The court also ruled that in the future, content owners that object to inclusion in Google's results need to ask the company to be deleted. Google will then have 24 hours to excise the material.

Currently, Google faces a U.S. lawsuit in federal court in the District of Columbia concerning its news search engine. In that case, Agence France Presse argues that Google violates its copyright by displaying headlines, lead sentences and photos in the Google News results.

Although the Belgian case isn't binding in the United States, AFP's lawyer, Joshua Kaufman, said the company views the decision as lending support to its argument. "We're delighted with the result," he said.

But other lawyers say U.S. courts are more likely to side with Google in copyright infringement suits. Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said U.S. courts focus on economic harm when evaluating copyright claims, in contrast to courts abroad, which give more weight to owners' "moral rights" to control their work. "In Europe, if you are an author or publisher, you have a moral right to control who publishes your stuff," he said. "In the United States, it's much more economically focused."

In addition, Schultz said, First Amendment considerations make U.S. courts less inclined to find copyright infringement when companies like Google make it easier for consumers to retrieve information. That's because the First Amendment protects people's right to access information, as well as publishers' right to make fair use of others' content.

After AFP filed suit, Google began removing its articles from the index, but Kaufman said the company is still seeking compensation for the three years when Google posted snippets of AFP stories. Google filed a motion to dismiss the case before trial, which the AFP opposed. The judge presiding over the lawsuit, Gladys Kessler, hasn't yet ruled on the motion.

To date, the AFP case appears to be the only U.S. lawsuit against Google stemming from Google News. But the search company has faced several other copyright cases including one by Blake Field, dealing with its cache function; a suit by adult publisher Perfect 10, dealing with image search; and a case by Gordon Roy Parker, stemming from Google Groups which offered excerpts from a chapter of a book he had posted on Usenet.

Those cases could just be the beginning for Google, which recently purchased video-sharing site YouTube--to which users frequently uploaded pirated clips. Recently, Google-YouTube had a public falling out with Viacom, which demanded that some 100,000 of its clips be removed from the site.

"Google lives at the boundaries of copyright law more than they publicly confess," said Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law.

So far, Google's results have been mixed. The search company won two major cases--those brought by Field and Parker--but lost the Perfect 10 case at the trial level. Google is appealing Perfect 10 to the 9th Circuit.