Brussels Court Begins Unwinding the Internet as a Free Reference Tool

BizzyBlog readers already saw this coming. Well, here it is:

A Brussels court has ordered internet giant Google to pay 1 million euro a day if it does not remove all news articles and pictures from French and German language newspapers on its news site, Belgian media reported on Monday.

“The judgment, dating back to September 5, made public only yesterday (Sunday), says that Google provides texts after the publishers have taken them off their own websites,” Flemish newspaper De Morgen reported.

The court considered this a breach of authors’ rights, as well as Belgian law on databanks, the daily said.

If the ruling is not published on Google’s Belgian website, the company will have to pay another half a million euro per day.

….. In De Morgen, director of the Flemish Daily Press Alex Fordyn complained that often the fact that journalists and publishers have to be paid for their research is forgotten by those who advocate news should be free for everyone.

I believe the traffic generated from a Google listing is compensation for that research, and that it’s up to the news media to figure out how to make money from the additional traffic generated.

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Related: Someone else agrees — “How Dare Google Send Belgian News Sites Traffic! Court Orders Them To Stop”