Reuters reported that "Google Inc. has lost a bid to overturn a Belgian court order that requires it to publish an earlier ruling forbidding it from reproducing article snippets on its news amalgamation service."
The world's most popular Web search engine seeked to cancel the provision of the ruling that requires it to publish the September 5 decision on its Belgian Web site or pay a fine of 500,000 euros ($633,800) per day for each day it fails to comply. Google even after losing the appeal had been refusing to publish the decision. But now it has published it on the Belgian homepage http://www.google.be/
The Belgian case was brought in March, by Copiepresse , an organization that manages copyright for Belgian newspapers. It started legal proceedings against Google over its inclusion of Belgian news sources without explicit permission. According to the ruling, Google had to :
1. Remove French and German-language content from the publishers from Google Belgium's web sites or pay a fine of €1 million per day.
2. Publish the ruling on Google Belgium and Google News Belgium or pay a fine of €500,000 per day.
Google spokeswoman Rachel Whetstone said, "We argued that posting the link on the home page in Belgium is unnecessary given how much publicity this court case and the judge's decision have received." Google argues that Google News is entirely lawful and brings benefits to publishers by driving web traffic to their sites and that any publisher can opt out by asking Google to remove its content. However, the publishers argue that Google is violating copyright law by reproducing the material in the first place.
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