Belgian newspapers sue Google for $77 mil

by cynthia yoo | May 28, 2008 at 11:23 am

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Google is being sued by a group of Belgian French-language newspapers for up to $77 million, on copyright violations.

The newspaper copyright group Copiepresse said it had summoned Google to appear again before a Brussels court in September that will decide on their claim that they suffered damages of between €32.8 million (US$51.7 million) and €49.2 million (US$77.5 million).
The group called on Google to pay a provisional amount of €4 million (US$6.3 million).

The world's largest search engine said it could not comment because it had not yet received the legal documents. Copiepresse said the May 22 summons would be delivered to Google's U.S. headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Last year Google lost a lawsuit filed by the newspapers that forced it to remove headlines and links to news stories posted on its Google News service and stored in its search engine's cache without the copyright owners' permission.

Copiepresse said in its summons that Google had violated Belgian copyright law by reproducing and publishing part of newspapers' stories and by storing the full versions of archived stories in its cached pages.

It said the losses were calculated by a professor at the University Libre de Bruxelles and damages should be based on articles stored via Google Search since April 13, 2001 and Google News since it launched in Belgium in 2006.