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

Intellectual Property Law

: Groklaw

Copiepresse's Complaint v. EU Commission Tossed Out

By Pamela Jones et al.

Do you remember Copiepresse, the Belgian association of newspapers that went after Google for linking to their members' articles in Google News? They tried to do something similar to -- get this -- the EU Commission, but they just got zonked. Their case was tossed out last Thursday, and in a way that bodes well for Google, I'd say, not to mention for the Internet and those of us who like to use it. The last link is to an article in French, and others I'll show you are too, and it was Groklaw's Sean Daly who brought this news to my attention and helped me to understand what is happening.

It seems the EU Commission has a kind of news aggregator of its own, which it calls Media Monitor, with several different services, and Copiepresse filed a lawsuit against the EU Commission for copyright infringement for linking to its members' Most Holy IP in the aggregation without asking for permission first.

Well, the Court of Seizures, which is a fine name for a court, threw out the Copiepresse complaint on jurisdictional grounds. Copiepresse says it won't appeal "for strategic reasons", but it will move the case to the civil court. I don't know how much that will help them. The Court of Seizures was persuaded by the EU Commission that its news search engine services are perfectly legal.

Full post as published by Groklaw on June 30, 2008 (boomark / email).