Earlier this week a Belgian court ruled that Google could not use material from French-language Belgian news sites without paying a fee. The ruling followed a case brought by Belgium's Association of Newspaper editors challenging the right of Google to run their news aggregator under the current copyright laws.
While Google removed the newspapers Le Soir, La Libre Belgique and La Derniere from its indexes immediately, it faced daily fines equivelent to USD$640,000 daily for not posting the 2315 word court ruling on its google.be and news.google.be pages.
Google News displays photographs, headlines, and opening paragraphs of articles by members of the print, broadcast, and online-only media. This content forms topical homepages for web users, who then are encouraged to read the complete article on the news source's website. The service was launched as a beta edition in April 2002, and came out of beta January 2006.
Google permits sites to block the search engine from visiting their sites or to remove themselves from the Google News index, but Pierre Louette, president of Agence France- Presse, the French news agency which last year began two legal actions against Google, said in an interview in The New York Times, "They are offering us an opt-out from appearing on Google, but this doesn't address the real problem, which is that they attach no value to the headlines, pictures and text from around the world that we spend a lot of money producing."
Google has always claimed that it does not pay for content but in early August it was revealed that Google was paying The Associated Press for news and photos. Newspaper organizations, such as the World Association of Newspapers, claimed this signals that Google places a monetary value on content that appears on both Google News or search engine results.
"The deal with AP seems to contradict Google's stated business model, which is not to pay for content," Louette said.
