Newspapers in Belgium filed a lawsuit against Google stating that the Google News website was reprinting the articles from their websites without paying them or asking for permission. It’s total crap because Google only prints the first few sentences of some of the articles on its news page. Anyhow, the newspapers won the lawsuit and as part of the court order, Google was instructed to print the full ruling of the Google News case on all of Google-Belgium’s webpages or else Google would have to pay half a million Euros per day. I guess Google’s pissed, but they complied, and now Google Belgium users have this long ugly statement on every single Google page that’s in Belgium.
UPDATE (29/09/06): Looks like they don’t have to display it anymore
Filed under: Google
