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.

iTWire reports: Google has paid big money to get its search Window as the default in Firefox, now it has made a deal with Adobe to distribute the Google toolbar with Shockwave (inherited from MacroMedia).

I was reading technocrat.net when I noticed a reference to an article titled Computers running Windows 98 best unhooked from Internet. Seems like MS will be dropping support for Win98, 98se and ME on July 11. At technocrat they think this is Good news for Linux.

Yesterday Eclipse Magazin published the nominees for the JAX Award at EAKon2006:

• Bioclipse
• E-Chalk
• FrUiT
• Jamaica VM
• JLibrary
• push2you
• RAP
• SOPA
• Spring
• World of Java

IMHO it's obvious that the Spring Framework will win. I don't know anything about most of the other products on the list, while some other, more known products that were on the long-list didn't make it.

Will Spring win the JAX Award 2006? I have entered my own product because it's fun to have an Award that is given to European projects only, but I don't think any of the other candidates has a chance at beating Spring...