Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Intellectual Property Law Blogs -> IPKat

Intellectual Property Law

: IPKat

They could have asked for 50 million ...

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

From the IPKat's friend ace reporter Stephanie Bodoni (Bloomberg) comes the exciting news that a group of Belgian newspapers is seeking as much as 49.1 million euros (US$77 million) from search-and-advertise corporation Google in a lawsuit over the right to feature links to the publishers' content on the internet.

Right: Copiepresse propose to replace search engines with teams of highly-trained readers ...

The group in question, Copiepresse, is not unknown to the IPKat's readers (see earlier items here and here): it is a confident, indeed aggressive body and it is now asking a Brussels court to award damages of between 32.8 and 49.1 million euros, following its successful claim in February last year that Google had infringed Belgian copyright laws by publishing links to articles on Google News without the newspapers' permission.

Google and Copiepress have been in discussions since that court ruling -- against which Google has lodged an appeal. However, the two sides have failed to sort their dispute out by consensual means. The damages sought in this action are in addition to the fine of 25,000 euros per day levied against Google until such time as it has removed all Belgian news content from its market-leading service (which Google is said to have done).

Left: this is how Digital Lifestyles views it
Copiepresse is also seeking to have Google publish the court's ruling last year, "in a visible and clear manner" on Google.be and news.Google.be for a period of 20 days (publication of court orders is one of the remedies available to the courts under the IP Enforcement Directive, Directive 2004/48). If Google doesn't publish the ruling, Copiepresse says that it will seek a further 1 million euro daily fine.

Right: Emilie Boudet's cat here, in the flesh and in paper format

Paper chase here
Make a paper cat here

Full post as published by IPKat on May 28, 2008 (boomark / email).