Download Squad

Once upon a time a group of Belgian newspaper publishers decided that they didn't like how Google was indexing their news stories and publishing headlines and short snippets on Google News and Google.be. While many newspaper publishers realized that Google was actually directing traffic to their web sites, Copiepresse, the organization representing the group of Belgian publishers took Google to court and demanded the search engine remove those newspapers from its index.

Google lost the court case and complied. But apparently not receiving search engine traffic isn't good enough for the newspaper publishers. No, they want cash. Up to €49 million or $77 million in cash, to be specific.

Now, in theory, we get it. Google was posting information online without first getting permission from the publishers. We'd argue that this was probably fair use since Google was only posting snippets including headlines and a few sentences. But the courts ruled otherwise, so whatever. The thing is, search engines are a huge driver of traffic. Asking the world's largest search engine to remove your pages is like asking to lose readers and advertising revenue. Even if the courts determine that Google does owe the newspaper publishers fines for infringing on their copyrights a few years ago, those newspapers are losing money today by keeping themselves out of Google's search index. And over time, that's could cost the companies a lot more than $77 million.

[via Techdirt]