AOIFE WHITE
Associated Press

BRUSSELS, Belgium – A court on Tuesday ruled in favour of Belgian newspapers that sued Google Inc., claiming that the Internet search leader infringed copyright laws and demanding it remove their stories.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company that operates the world’s most-used search engine immediately said it would appeal, claiming its Google News service was “entirely legal.”

A Brussels court ruled in favour of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.

It ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites – including Google News – that it displays without the newspapers’ permission.

But in the future, it said it would be up to copyright owners to get in touch with Google by e-mail to complain if the site was posting content that belonged to them. Google would then have 24 hours to withdraw the content or face a daily fine of 1,000 euros ($1,295 U.S.).

The court cut a retroactive daily fine of 25,000 euros ($32,390U.S.) for each day Google did not comply – far lower than an earlier judgment that threatened 1 million euros ($1.3 millionU.S.) a day.

However, since Google removed content and links to Copiepresse newspapers such as Le Soir and La Derniere Heure in September, it is unclear how much any total fine would be.

Google would not comment on the fine, saying its lawyers were still examining the judgment, but did say it was disappointed with the ruling and would appeal.

“We believe that Google News is entirely legal,” the company said in a statement. “We only ever show the headlines and a few snippets of text and small thumbnail images. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the newspaper’s website.”

Google said its service actually does newspaper a favour by driving traffic to their sites.

But the court said Google’s innovations don’t get exemptions from Belgian data storage law.

“We confirm that the activities of Google News, the reproduction and publication of headlines as well as short extracts, and the use of Google’s cache, the publicly available data storage of articles and documents, violate the law on authors’ rights,” the ruling said.

Most Belgian newspapers offer new articles to readers for free but charge for access to older stories.

Copiepresse first cried foul last February after Google launched a Belgian version of its Google News service in January 2006, displaying content from local newspapers found by its search engine.

Copiepresse insisted that Google should have asked first before it posted a headline and a link to the story. It also claimed that Google hurt the rights of authors because its stored cache of older stories effectively gave away content to archived stories they usually charge for.

A court ruling in September agreed and ordered Google to remove newspaper content from its news index under threat of daily fines of 1 million euros ($1.3 million U.S.).

That decision came as a shock to Google, which had failed to appear at an earlier court hearing. The court later agreed to hear the case again to allow Google to put its side forward.

PayPerPost, a place for bloggers and advertisers to connect and profit, has made a significant change on Monday which will force bloggers to disclose that they are being paid for their posts. This is due to a recent move by the Federal Trade Commission to force word-of-mouth advertisers to disclose financial inventives to promote products. The move doesn’t completely fix the problem but it is a definite move in the right direction for the company.

The Euro Court of Justice threw out a case by Germany to which wanted to allow tobacco advertising in the country. The current law had outlawed tobacco advertising throughout the European Union but Germany had sought to overthrow that EU-wide ruling on tobacco sponsorships and advertising.

“I was always confident that this directive would be upheld by the court,” said EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou. “We now expect Germany to finalize the adoption in its national law as soon as possible, just as other member states have done.”

Smoking kills over 6.5 million people a year in the European Union. You’d think after World War II the Germans would wise up.

The cookie has crumbled and the new “Got Milk” marketing campaign in San Francisco has vanished. The bus shelters were made to smell like cookies to enduce people to go buy milk and cookies and satisfy their hunger. I was thinking a few days ago that homeless people would start licking the walls and I was right. City officials ordered CBS Outdoor, the company that holds the advertising contract for its bus shelters, to remove the adhesive strips Tuesday, just one day after they were put up as part of a “Got Milk?” campaign. Other critics argue that their allergies acted up due to the chemicals placed on the bus shelters (winter weather a better explanation?). The promotion only cost the “Got Milk” marketing campaigners $30 per shelter so the upset will not hurt them economically.

Prosecutors, seemingly out of the blue, dropped the charges against Michael Anthony Bradley that arose when he tried to extort money from Google. Bradley had threatened to release software that generated false clicks on Google ads that would have resulted in millions of dollars in click fraud being perpetrated. While the prosecutors had plenty of evidence, including a tape of Bradley’s threat to Google executives, it may have been Google itself that lead to the charges being dismissed.

The company appears to have refused to allow prosecutors or anyone else access to its click fraud-related business operations. Doing so would have, according to Google, would have not only revealed information that would help its competitors, but also would have helped people who try to perpetrate click-fraud. But not cooperating also means that the guy gets off after explicitly stating that he was working to defraud Google and its advertisers.

So what do you think? Did Google make the right call by keeping its trade secrets secret? Or are they damaging their own reputation, as well as that of the rest of the search ad market, by not prosecuting this guy regardless of the cost?

Big tobacco saved a ton of money yesterday in a Supreme Court decision when it comes to marketing light and ultra light cigarettes to conusmers.

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with Philip Morris USA, declining to disturb a court ruling that threw out a $10.1 billion verdict over the company’s “light” cigarettes.Â� Last year, the Illinois Supreme Court threw out the massive fraud judgment against Philip Morris, a unit of Altria Group (MO) based in Richmond, Va., in a class-action lawsuit involving “light” cigarettes.

Because the Federal Trade Commission allowed companies to characterize their cigarettes as “light” and “low tar,” Philip Morris could not be held liable under state law even if the terms it used could be found false or misleading, the state court said.

The case involved 1.1 million people who bought “light” cigarettes in Illinois. They said Philip Morris knew when it introduced such cigarettes in 1971 that they were no healthier than regular cigarettes, but hid that information and the fact that light cigarettes actually had a more toxic form of tar.

A copyright infringement lawsuit was filed in France which stems from a French documentary video hosted on Google Video. The plaintiff is seeking restitution in the amount of $193,000 in damages. Like most videos, when Google received a complaint they removed it right away. Cease and desist order anyone? What happened to those preventing further litigation?

When Google took over YouTube Inc. in a $1.6 billion stock deal, the company was simply begging for trouble. No one could be more correct. Google’s online video service has been recently sued for copyright infringement in fear that they hold Google now has in the online video world will plague all intellectual property rights laws.

Google has not provided detail but disclosed the video copyright lawsuit in its’ quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commision. In Wednesday’s lawsuit, Google acknowledged that more lawsuits for copyright infringement would follow when the YouTube deal closes. A theory running around the blogging community is that Google has set aside $500 million from the YouTube deal to pay for copyright lawsuits. Tuesday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a Web 2.0 audience that this rumor was unture. Read

Creator of ‘lunch meat’ canned Spam, recently lost a bid to trademark their company name for unsolicited emails. The company does not want software and internet companies using the term in their marketing and promotional campaigns. Hormel Foods is afraid that the general public will one day believe that the company stole the term “Spam” for their canned meat product. Moreover, the company pointed out there were more Google search results for ‘unsolicited email spam’ than for the spicy meat.

IÂ� wanted to test Hormel Food’s claim and did an image search on Google for “spam logo” which returned 18 images and only 3 of which were the Spam logo. One of those three was X’d out and was featured in an anti-spam article.

It’s sad when cosmetic companies have to involve bitter lawsuits. Healthcare company Johnson and Johnson recently filed a lawsuit against L’Oreal citing the company was using unwarranted superiority claims for its’ sunscreen product, Anthelios SX.

The lawsuit charges during prmotion of Anthelios SX, L’Oreal promoted their product as having superior protection from harmful UV rays than competitor J&J’s similar products. J&J is seeking permanent injunctions for L’Oreal to stop using false claims in their promotional material. J&J is seeking $1 million is damages.

The youth friendly line of flavored tobacco cigarettes including “Twista Lime” and “Mocha Taboo” are being pulled. RJ Reynolds agreed to the U.S. ban after months of recent controversy.

Critics argue that these cigarettes were developed to be marketed to youths. At $5.99 a pack, I hardly agree. The company has agreed to stop giving ‘candy, friut, dessert, or alcohol’ related names to its’ cigarettes. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer also made a statement that the company must distontinue use of scratch and sniff samples. “Candy-flavored cigarettes can now join Joe Camel on the ash heap of defunct tobacco marketing schemes,” said Donald Distasio of the American Cancer Society of New York and New Jersey. “This is a tremendous victory.” Read

Rock group Weezer has filed a lawsuit against Miller Brewing Company in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The lawsuit alledges that Miller used the term ‘Weezer’ in several ads that ran in Rolling Stone Magazine back in 2004. The suit claims that Miller used the band’s name without permission and also seeks to take action against Miller’s advertising agency.Â� Read | Add to Onlywire

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