By: Google Inc. and Belgian newspapers will hear a court verdict early next year on whether the search engine was wrong to display content from the newspapers' websites without paying them or asking their permission.
A judge for the Brussels-based Court of First Instance said Friday that she would deliver her verdict after the Christmas break, without giving a precise date.
Both sides pleaded their case in a three-hour hearing Friday. Google failed to appear at an earlier hearing that saw a judge order the California-based company to remove Belgian newspaper content from its news index, threatening daily fines of 1 million euros ($1.28 million) until it complied.
The court later agreed to give Google another hearing to make its case.
Google's lawyers insisted that the company had not broken copyright law by showing headlines, a few lines of text and a link to the original story. That link, Google said, only helps the newspaper business by driving traffic there.
But attorneys for Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing the country's French-language editors, claimed that Google's Belgian news site, which launched in January, offered free archived articles that usually sell on a subscription basis.
Because of the earlier ruling, Google has stripped Belgian newspaper content from Google News.
The company's French- and Dutch-language Belgian news pages are now empty of much local content, largely containing reports from news agencies, news Web sites and foreign newspapers.
This is not the first time Google's automatically-generated news aggregation pages have irked content providers.
The French news agency Agence France Press is suing Google for at least $17.5 million U.S. in federal court in Washington, D.C., arguing that the Google service essentially replicates for free what AFP subscribers pay for.
Separately, Google has agreed to pay The Associated Press for stories and photographs. Neither Google nor New York-based AP have disclosed financial terms or other details.
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