Google case: Belgian Court ruled in favour of newspapers and collecting societies

The Brussels Court of First Instance delivered its verdict on 13 February 2007 in the case opposing Google to Belgian newspapers and collecting societies.

The Court ruled that the reproduction and publication of headlines as well as short extracts of articles, the use of Google's cache and the publicly available data storage of articles and documents violate the law on authors' rights.

The Court thus confirmed the 15 September 2006's ruling which ordered the search-engine to stop reproducing extracts from Belgian newspapers.

The Brussels Court of First Instance ordered Google to pay €25,000 a day until it removes all news content from Belgian newspapers from its website.

The full text of the decision is available here.