Lawyers for Belgium's French-speaking newspapers and Internet search engine Google clashed in court on Friday during a hearing into a copyright case against the US giant.
The newspaper editors, who have lodged the case against Google, accuse it of violating copyright rules by displaying parts of articles, photos and graphics from their media Web sites on its own site without permission or compensation.
"Google sucks up content from web sites and recopies it onto its site," said Bernard Magrez, lawyer for Copiepress, an association representing the papers.
For example, he said, Internet users logging on to the Web site of Belgian newspaper Le Soir had to pay to access its archived articles, but if they went onto Google's site, they could access those articles for free.
Hitting back, Google's lawyers said the papers were seeking to profit from its immense financial success in recent years.
"What's at stake today is not copyright but money," lawyer Erik Valgaeren told the court in Brussels.
Google's main defense is that it is a search engine that helps users find information on other Web sites and not a so-called portal that hosts its own information.
Google News only displays 150 characters per article, Google lawyer Celine Eyers said. The company considers that it should not have to pay copyright fees because it only directs users to newspapers sites.
"Google thinks that newspapers should thank it for raising the profile of their work," said Karine Doutrelepont, a lawyer for an association which manages copyright for Belgian journalists and backs the newspapers.
But, she added, "it asphyxiates the entire content through appropriation."
After a hearing lasting more than three hours, the presiding judge said she would issue a ruling on the case "after the Christmas holidays," without offering a precise date.
On Sept. 5, a lower court ordered Google News to stop reproducing content from French-language and German-language newspapers in Belgium on its Belgian Web site.
The California-based company, which faced a daily fine of one million euros (US$1.3 million) if it did not comply with that ruling, more or less acquiesced, although there was some grumbling from the papers about items still available on Google's archive section.
Separately, Italian prosecutors on Friday put two Google Italy representatives under investigation as part of an inquiry into how a video of teenagers harassing an autistic classmate surfaced on its Video site, a judicial source said.
The two are accused of failing to check on the content of the video posted on the Internet search engine's Web site.
The video, which sparked outrage in the country, showed four teenagers beating and poking fun at a 17-year-old disabled boy in a classroom in the northern Italian city of Turin.
Prosecutors have already put the four students and a teacher under investigation. The students have also been suspended until the end of the school year.
A spokeswoman for Google in Europe said the Internet search engine was sorry for the distress caused by the video and had acted swiftly when it was informed of its content.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS