Wall Street Journal Sees the Belgian Court’s Threat to Information Flow Noted Here
From a subscription-only editorial today, the WSJ reacts to the Google Belgium and Google News Belgium court case covered here previously, and notes that there is plenty of reason to be concerned:
Google, meanwhile, maintains that the snippets it uses on Google News fall under the “fair use” doctrine, which allows small parts of a copyrighted work to be copied without legal liability. Fair use has yet to be fully defined for the Internet age, but the logical conclusion of the Belgian court’s decision is clear enough. If displaying a first sentence and a headline from another Web site is illegal, then so is much of what we do online: The blogger who links to a news story, the Fortune 500 company excerpting an article about itself, and all search engines could be breaking the law. Considering some American judges’ penchant for applying foreign precedent, expect one to notice and use the Belgian logic next time Google goes to court across the Atlantic.
