Belgien vs Google, nächste Runde

Nachdem Google vor einiger Zeit Belgien gelöscht und den zugehörigen Urheberrechtsstreit verloren hat, steht jetzt der Antrag auf Schadenersatz, berichtet der The Inquirer (unter Berufung auf Reuters). Es geht um die Inhalte, die Google News indexiert und wohl im Archiv bereitgehalten hat, auch als der originale Content nicht mehr frei zugänglich genommen wurde. Und das ganze war auch noch außerhalb von Belgien verfügbar.

Klingt von hier aus nach einem eher minderen Skandal, von der Sorte „Geschäftsmodell gegen Geschäftsmodell“. Ausführlicher bei ars.technica gestern: „The whole case might seem a bit absurd to readers from all the other countries where Google News is legal“, und weiter:

When Google lost the case, it not only pulled the stories from the News archive and stopped indexing them, but it yanked the papers from its main index. Apparently, this wasn’t good for business, and the papers soon worked out a deal to get back in the index while remaining out of Google News.

One of the issues in the case turned on whether something like a headline could even be considered copyrightable content. This led the judge to draw a distinction between headlines that show no „stamp of their author,“ like „The King visits Sweden,“ with those headlines that show more originality, like „The tax exemption rage of Didier Reynders.“ (I am not making these examples up.)

Once the copyright issue was established, the Court went on to rule that Google did not qualify for the „citation and news reporting“ exemptions in Belgian copyright law for a variety of reasons not particularly interesting to go into here.

So, Google lost the case and was ordered to remove articles from any publication that requested it within 24 hours of receiving such notice. Fines would be issued for any delay, but Google wasn’t on the hook for massive damages. Now, however, Copiepresse wants those damages, and it wants a provisional fine of €4 million while the much larger fine is being worked out.