(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)
After the decision against Google obtained on 5 September 2006, the Belgium newspaper group Copiepresse has planned new actions against MSN and Yahoo, alleging that they are infringing its copyright by showing excerpts of articles and images from newspapers on their Belgian portals without paying.
Copiepresse sent a cease & desist letter to the msn.be website, asking them not to post excerpts from the articles under their copyright. Major Belgium newspapers, such as Le Libre and Le Soir, are part of Copiepresse and they are offering articles in French and German. Copiepresse considers that the search engines are unfairly taking advantage of the content created by its members and are gaining financially from selling advertisement attracted by others people’s content.
The Belgium group has also announced that they would start similar actions against Yahoo services very soon.
The Microsoft Division in Belgium has started talks with Copiepresse in order to reach a compromise. It is not clear yet whether the Belgians are looking for an advertisement revenue-share agreement or a fixed amount to be paid for allegedly using their content, but their main focus now is to remove all their content from the search engines. Microsoft just started the negotiations with Copiepresse on this issue, but no agreement has been reached yet.
Meanwhile, in order to avoid any kind of court action against them, Microsoft announced on 20 October 2006 that it had "provisionally" agreed to comply with the Copiepresse request. The company will remove all the cached articles and links from the msn.be website, its Live search engine and their news aggregator.
This situation means that right now all the Belgium newspaper stories are excluded from the 2 main search engines, since Google announced that it has deleted that info from its Google News site worldwide and that the search engine will not provide links to the cached pages.
The Copiepresse lawyers are still asking for the 34 millions fines to be paid by Google, since it has not complied with the court decision right away.
Copiepresse continues copyright crusade(20.10.2006)
http://www.theregister.com/2006/10/20/copiepresse_targets_yahoo/
MSN is latest target of Belgian copyright complaint (13.10.2006)
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/10/13/HNpursuemsn_1.html
Google, Microsoft Surrender To Belgians (20.10.2006)
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20061020GoogleMicroso...
EDRI-gram: Belgium says no to Google News (27.09.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.18/google_be