Google Inc. launched a robust defense of its practice of caching and summarizing newspaper articles on its news search engine Google News in a Brussels courtroom on Friday.
The world's most popular search engine had been accused of copyright infringement by a group of French-language Belgian newspapers.
Lawyers for Copiepresse, the association representing the newspapers, said Google was giving away archived articles that the newspapers charge readers for, and was therefore undermining the papers' business model.
Google currently faces copyright lawsuits on a number of fronts. Agence France Presse has sued the company for indexing and republishing AFP news stories taken from the Web sites of its customers. Some authors and publishers in France and the U.S. are suing it over its Google Book Search tool, which displays whole pages from books in the public domain, and excerpts from books still under copyright. And a French film production company has sued the company for distributing a film through its Google Video service.
At issue in the Belgian case is the way Google's news search sites present headlines and excerpts of news stories taken from other Web sites, grouping together stories that Google's software determines are about the same event.
The hearing finished by early afternoon. The judge said she would give her verdict early in the new year.
(Read complete story at Computerworld )
Furl It
Simpy
No comments:
Post a Comment