LWGLIN's Journal: Google convicted by Belgian Court

A Belgian court has ruled that Google has violated the law on copyright and ancillary rights (1991) and the law on data bases (1998). The court order dates from September 5, but was made public yesterday. All text, images and other material owned by the French- and German-speaking newspaper publishers that are a member of the Copiepress group have to be removed from Google's databases; otherwise Google risks a fine of 1,000,000 euro a day (starting today). This precedent compromises the content of 'free news sites' on the Internet.