Google is no stranger to accusations of copyright violation. In fact, the search engine is currently in the midst of defending YouTube - one of the most high profile members of the Google family - against such accusations made by media conglomerate Viacom, in a landmark case that could change the way we use the internet.But this week, an old aggressor has raised its head once more, as Copiepresse - a copyright group representing members of Belgian's French and German language press - demands up to €49 million ($77 million) in damages from Google.
The Associated Press reports that the Belgian group has sent a legal summons to the search engine, asking it to appear in court in September in order to decide whether Google should have to pay it between €32.8 million and €49.2 million. In addition, a €4 million "provisional payment" is said to have also been demanded.
Google vs Copiepresse: a potted history
Copiepresse first filed a lawsuit against Google in August 2006, in which the group claimed that the search giant had broken the copyright regulations of certain Belgian publishers (including Le Soir and Le Libre Belgique) by indexing articles on both Google.be and Google News. Typically, these publishers charge users to access their content, asserting that Google was undermining their operations by indexing snippets of their content without consent.
In its defence, Google claimed that publishing the titles and short summaries of articles hosted by Copiepresse's publishers constituted "fair use" - an ideology that allows limited use of copyrighted material without the owner's permission in the United States, but has no basis in European law.
In September, a Belgian court ruled against the US search engine, ordering it to remove the publishers' content from both these sites. While Google's appeal for the court to reconsider this decision was accepted - on the condition that the order to remove existing indexed content was upheld - in February 2007, the original decision was reaffirmed.
Google and Copiepresse today
For the last 15 months, Google has been contesting the February ruling. Regarding the new demands from Copiepresse, a Google spokesman said that the search engine had still not received the summons, further asserting:
"We strongly believe that Google News and Google Web search are legal, and that we have not violated Copiepresse's copyright. This is why we are appealing the February 2007 ruling. We consider that this new claim for damages is groundless, and we intend to vigorously challenge it."
Copiepresse's approach to Google's indexing of its content has always confused many. After all, so many companies across the world invest tremendous time, money and energy into search engine optimisation techniques in order to ensure that their sites appear higher up in Google's rankings, that it seems almost incredulous that organisations would go to such lengths to deny themselves this valuable exposure.
What's more, Google has always asserted that any site which does not wish its content to be indexed should implement the robots.txt file, which prevents spiders from crawling web pages and thus stops users accessing these pages via the search engine.
Copiepresse is yet to comment on its motivation for this latest move - a mind-boggling one, considering its successes so far. But whether or not it manages to extract its requested €49 million from Google - let alone the provisional €4 million - is up to Belgium's courts to decide.
