Google is still fighting the Belgian copyright cops

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google is still contesting a ruling in Belgium that stops it from publishing links to local newspapers as well as snippets of their content on its News pages.

The firm is responding to a court ruling from 2007 that found it in breach of copyright laws by reproducing some of the exciting and groundbreaking news that comes out of Belgium.

Google is arguing that there is nothing wrong with what it does, which is to take something that someone else has written and use it on its own webpages, and in a bullish statement Google rejected everything that the Belgian courts had said about it.

"We believe that referencing information with short headlines and direct links to the source - as it is practiced by search engines, Google News and just about everyone on the web - is not only legal but also encourages web users to read newspapers online," it said in a statement released to The INQUIRER.

It continued, "We're confident that the court will hear our arguments and see the importance of this case, and we remain committed to collaborating further with publishers and exploring news ways for them to monetise online news".

According to a report at Bloomberg news, Google's legal team went even further in court and suggested that Belgium, which famous for its pastries and putting mayonnaise on chips, could destroy the Internet as we know it if it does not leave Google and its world wide web indexing and content scraping experiments alone.

"This case will have serious consequences to the way information is searched and managed on the Internet," Eric Valgaeren, one of the lawyers representing Google told the Brussels Court of Appeals, according to the report. "A negative ruling would put at risk all referencing services or even cause them to disappear."

Belgium is looking for reparations from Google for the damage the country alleges has been done to its news industry, and has asked that the firm should be assessed to cough up $77.2 million.

Valgaeren described the sum as "astronomical", but we understand that the average bankster uses the esoteric term 'bonus' as a description for such sums of money. µ