On Monday I wrote about deeplinking and terms of service for blogs and today I see The New York Times has a story about a Brussels court telling Google they must pay $32,600 USD each day it displayed links to articles from Belgian newspapers without permission.

Ouch.

The ruling, which Google said it would appeal, was hailed by some newspaper industry representatives and may also have an impact on a lawsuit against Google by the news service Agence France-Presse.

“As the first decision to condemn a search engine for indexing news articles, you can be sure publishers around the world are paying attention,” said Cyril Fabre, a lawyer in Paris at Alexen, a law firm specializing in Internet law and intellectual property.

The Times article is a bit vague on the details but my immediate though was if it had to do with Google News, I didn’t understand the infringment.

Google News (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock), which happens to be my favorite place to check for news headlines, still isn’t running ads. I don’t go to Google News to read any actual news though, just the headlines, and I’m sure if they are counting my clicks on each visit, I’m visiting 3-5 news sources on average for every visit. I also keep track of news by keyword and RSS using Google News. Next to search (#1), Adwords/Adsense (#2) and Gmail (#3), Google News is still my #4 favorite Google service right now (see my top 10 Google products/services list from June 2006)

I don’t see how Google News is hurting any news organization, in fact they are likely helping them by sending a significant amount of traffic (readers and potential subscribers) they might not receive otherwise. If a website really wants out, they can use a robots.txt file to block the spider from coming.

Indeed, this is exactly the recommendation on the Official Google Blog about the court case yesterday:

Today’s ruling does not affect the current content of Google News because the websites represented by Copiepresse have already been removed from Google News. In fact, hundreds of news publishers in Belgium and around the world are delighted to be included in Google News because it helps more people find their websites and read their articles. That’s why Google receives far more requests for inclusion than requests for removal.

What are others saying?
Joe Duck points out that Google makes money from other people’s content, they don’t do their own content. Actually, they do create their own content. They have their own toolbar, they have online spreadsheets and docs software. And what about Gmail? Yeah, it’s us looking at our email and monetizing our eyeballs, but the program itself is content. And then there are all the blogs they have. Definitely original content there. I don’t see news headlines and a few words as not being Fair Use.

Donna Bogatin at ZDNet talks about Google’s reactionary tactics on copyright: “Google will not change its reactive handling of copyright infringement issues, however, because if Google had to pay for content, like every other “conventional” business, than it would not have the super profit margins or market cap that has made it the darling of Wall Street.”

John Blossom: “It’s time for publishers to stop playing games and to take a more serious look at Google as a business partner that can deliver good value from their services - if you have a good handle on the metrics needed to prove out that value.”

Greg Sterling’s recommendation (argh, dump the Snap popups already) for the Belgian newspaper? “[Include] their feeds in Google, strengthening their own sites and potentially creating a separate, newspaper owned Belgian news aggregator/social news site.”

See more commentary at TechMeme.

Hmm thoughts
This one’s easy and doesn’t require the courts. There are plenty of competing news agencies that will be more than happy to take the high quality Google traffic. I love Google traffic and I don’t care how they use my headlines and a few words — Fair Use from a copyrighted content source — to monetize past, current and future works. If they start gobbling up more than what would be deemed Fair Use by reasonable people and monetizing that then it’s time to call in the lawyers.

• Internet piracy case shelved by Supreme Court
• Chicago federal court rules spyware can be illegal trespassing on computers
• Burning in the Google toaster
• Thumbnails fall under ‘fair use’ in preliminary court decision
• Google thumbnails are Fair Use, court foreshadows YouTube decision?
• Microsoft appeals decision over patent number 5,838,906 - Eolas