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Article Date: 31/10/2006
Article Title: Copiepress and Copyright Issues
In 2003 Google started Google News, a service displaying short excerpts and photographs extracted from electronic newspaper articles to its website visitors. The service also incorporates a hyperlink to the articles in their entirety. The collection of articles is automated and makes use of Google’s cache of various servers.
Copiepresse, a copyright management organisation representing mainly the French speaking press commenced legal proceedings before the Court of First Instance in Brussels. Copiepress claimed injunctive relief from Google’s violation of Belgian Copyright Law 1994 and Database Protection Law 1998.
Last month, the Court found in favour of Copiepresse who brought the claim on behalf of the press it represents. Google did not appear in court, and did not co-operate with the expert witness that was appointed already several months earlier. The Court ordered Google to remove the articles and photographs from the cache on its servers and to remove the links on its site to the articles in question. In addition, Google was ordered to publish the decision on its “.be” website for an uninterrupted period of 5 days. Google was further ordered to pay penalties to accrue on a daily basis if it did not remove the publication or publish the decision on its website for the specified periods.
The Court found that the excerpts of the articles reproduced on Google’s site constituted copyright infringement. However, The Court did not explicitly decide on whether a hyperlink to a cached article also constituted ‘reproduction’ and infringed copyright. It appears that the Court did not consider any ‘fair use’ arguments in respect of Google’s use.
The appointed expert in the case concluded that Google acted as an information portal in offering the news service rather than merely as a search engine.
The Court also found that Google had violated the Belgian Database Protection law. According to the Court, the Google News Website constituted a database of systematically arranged data . In collecting the articles each day without permission Google damaged the interests of the producers of the databases in question.
Google and Copiepress disagree as to the extent of Google’s compliance with the judgment and Google has appealed the decision. Google is likely to submit that it has not extracted data from a database as such but merely utilised its cache system and has not ‘reproduced’ material but merely operated a search engine referral facility. The case is to be further debated in November. We will continue to report on developments.
Stefan Van Camp
Advocat
Eversheds LLP
Tel: +32 27 37 93 66
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