Google Reinstates Links to Belgian Newspapers, After Court-Ordered Removal

Google is under more and more pressure from government regulators as the site gets bigger and bigger. There is a fear that the site's size may be encouraging unfair and anti-competitive behavior on its side.

But, even as Google is being pressured into being 'fairer' by allowing more sites to be visible, it's also being punished for making other sites visible, i.e. infringing on their copyrights by using snippets of text from those sites and linking to them.

One such example, one that has been going badly for Google, is a lawsuit brought by Belgian news group Copiepresse representing several local newspapers.

The group sued Google in 2006 for using extracts from its newspapers in Google News. Anyone that has ever visited Google News knows that the whole point of the site is to get people to visit news websites.

Regardless, Google lost the trial back in 2007 and now lost the appeal as well. While Google may be thinking about taking the case to a higher court, it had to comply with the initial ruling which ordered it to remove all links to these websites from Google News and Google.be.

"We believe search engines are of real benefit to publishers because they drive valuable traffic to their websites. If publishers do not want their websites to appear in search results, technical standards like robots.txt and metatags enable them automatically to prevent the indexation of their content," Google said in 2007 after the initial ruling.

"These Internet standards are nearly universally accepted and are honored by all reputable search engines. In addition, Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners," it added.

"If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index—all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs," it said.

In the end, Google did just that, it removed all content from its index, prompting Copiepresse to complain about a "harsh retaliation" from Google. Because, obviously, traffic to the sites died once Google stopped linking to them in the search results.

So the newspapers asked Google to reinstate the links and Google complied, on the condition that the newspapers don't enforce the monetary penalty they had won in court, of about $25,000 per link or instance of 'copyright infringement.'

A five-year legal battle, which the newspapers won has been pretty much for nothing. They could have simply used robots.txt or other means of blocking Google from indexing their contents or removing it from Google News.

Instead they went to court and won. And then they realized that they didn't really want to win, in the strictest sense, they just wanted to get traffic from Google and maybe have the company pay for the 'privilege.'