Is Google legal?
A Belgian court ruled against Google’s use of newspaper stories in early September. If you believe Google, it did nothing wrong and failed to defend itself because it was unaware of the publishers’ lawsuit. If you believe the publishers, Google is lying and infringes copyright on a colossal scale.
The parties return to court on 23rd November in a case that finds legal uncertainty looming over the world’s leading search engines.
The case focused on Google’s news aggregation service, which automatically scans the websites of newspapers, extracting headlines and snippets of text from each story.