This is a little late by blog standards, but it still hasn’t had much conversation. Google lost its case in the Belgium Courts. They have been ordered to remove all content concerning the newspaper from google.be. The basis being that newspaper’s copyright had been violated, by the search engine and its cache. The first being obvious and the second in that the content was no longer even available on the newspaper’s site.

Is this a strike for the web author’s everywhere? Protection of their right to make money on their content? Is it a strike against Google’s business model? Or is it a strike against the web and search engines everywhere and thus a strike directly against the author’s? The claim is that the content was removed by the author/publisher from their site, but it still existed within Google and Google News. Ok and? Was the information in Google wrong? There is no mention of it being incorrect. Is it publicly available? Its a free site, not a subscription site. The site gains traffic from a search engine, driving readership and revenues up. They are making money on their content. Google’s business model does make money directly and indirectly from other people’s content, but then so do all of the search engines, it is how they stay in business. News stories are generate from research and collecting information from sources, ie spidering and searching directly. Sources can and can not be disclosed depending on who they are. A search is an index of sources and credits directly the source by sending the reader directly to the source. So how is this a breach of a copyright?

I think this is more a case of yet another company/industry falling behind the technology driven revenue curve and lashing out to bring it back the ball to their court. Is this yet another RIAA ruling break for Europe? Will they be suffering under the same misguided laws that have happened in the US with the RIAA? I sure hope not.

Technorati Tags: RIAA, Google, Belgium, Search Engines, Revenue, CopyRight