The look of google.be this morning. The belgium courts have favored the belgium press association to protect the belgium press against the theft of copy right material by Google. Google news has been found guilty of printing headlines and small 50 word extract of new items from belgium online newspapers. The court has deemed said action to be an infringement of the online newspapers copyright terms, outside of "fair-use" terms, and ruled as follows:

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- € per day of delay;

The court clearly does not understand that

• the online newspapers are liberally rewarded with a huge influx of traffic from Google
• small quotes appearing on Google are great PR and marketing for the newspapers
• the material published is a very small fraction of the material in each article

The belgium court in question is clearly a copyright and trademark stalwart, not even allowing for a small quotation of the copyright material. Quite the opposite of the open source business model.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt thinks the conflict should have remained as business negotiation between Google and each newspaper.

Because of our scale and because of the amounts of money that we have, Google has to be more careful with respect to launching products that may violate other people's notion of their rights. But also, frankly, we find ourselves in litigation and the litigation was expensive, and diverts the management team, etcetera, from our mission. In the cases that you describe, most of the litigation in my judgment was really a business negotiation being done in a courtroom. And I hate to say that, but that is my personal opinion. And in most cases a change in our policy or a financial change would in fact address many of the issues.

Danny Sullivan offers the best coverage of the case, with interviews with the two parties.

It remains to be seen whether the papers are actually advantaged by being excluded from the Google search engine, which dominates European internet traffic. After all the "fair-use terms" of copyright material were designed into the law for the benefit of both authors and the community.