Google News Found Guilty of Copyright Violation

schmiddy writes "A court in Brussels, Belgium, has just found Google guilty of violating copyright law with its Google News aggregator. According to the ruling, Google News' links and brief summaries of news sources violates copyright law. Google will be forced to pay $32,600 for each day it displayed the links of the plaintiffs. Although Google plans to appeal, this ruling could have chilling effects on fair use rights on the web in the rest of Europe as well if other countries follow suit."

Comments

Re:What's good for the goose...

[Daemonstar]

I know that my mom and wife both use Google as their "address bar". My wife wanted to go somewhere the other day (she had to use my Linux box; I playing around with Vista on the Windows one), and I told her to just type the address in the address bar (it was like JcPenney's or something). She said, "I don't want to type it in the address bar, I just want to type it in Google." Google is the default page on my Win PC. My mom does the same thing; she never uses the address bar. She usually asks, "How do I do that?" when I tell her to just type it in.

Back when I was employed at an ISP, we had a Google search box on our main page. Whenever our main page was down for updates or screwups, we *always* got calls from users asking when the page would be back up so they could surf the web. They would use the Google search box to get around the Internet instead of using the address bar or using a different search engine.

It's not far fetched that they will lose traffic if Google doesn't index them in their search results.