Copiepresse is the newspaper representative body which is in a
protracted legal battle with Google over that company's use of
newspaper material in its Google News service. It won its initial
court battle and is now claiming damages of up to €49 million from
the search engine giant.
Copiepresse also launched a legal challenge to the European
Commission's news aggregation services NewsBrief and NewsExplorer.
These collect the day's news from various sources and present a
digest of the news.
The group took the case on the same grounds as its Google case,
that the use of the material without newspapers' permission was an
infringement of their copyright. The Commission said that it "fully
respects the law on copyright" and that exemptions to that law for
commentary on news reporting allowed it to use material.
Belgian press reports said that the case was thrown out of the
Court of Seizures in Belgium – a court used when one party wants
the state to take action against another – because a report
produced for the court backed the Commission and because there was
a jurisdictional problem with the case .
The Commission successfully argued that the case was in the
jurisdiction of the European Communities.
Copiepresse had a technical report produced for the court which
appeared to back its case, but at a subsequent hearing the
Commission appeared, at which point a new report had to be
produced. That report was legal rather than technical and appeared
to back the Commission's position.
Once the second report was produced while both parties were
engaged with the trial process the judge ruled the first report
inadmissible.
In a rough computer-aided translation the Commission's lawyer
said: "contrary to what Copiepresse claimed, the report shows that
the Commission respects copyright since Europe Media Monitor (EMM)
is using quite legitimate the exceptions provided by law."
"It provides that, under certain circumstances, it is not
necessary to ask the permission of the author to make use of his
work. This is particularly true of the press review," said the
Commission lawyer, in translation.
General secretary of Copiepress Margaret Boribon told Belgian
news agency Belga that the group would not appeal against the
throwing out of the case but would re-submit it to Belgium's civil
court.
"The main thing was to get the European Commission out of the
woods," she said.
Boribon said that it would not be set back by the throwing out
of its report because the Commission-submitted report also gave it
information on which it could take action. "We no longer need it
because now we have even more to support our action before the
civil court," she said.
The Commission's lawyer said that the case had been thrown out
on jurisdictional grounds because before the Commission's
participation in the case the judge had considered the initial
report without the context of the European law arguments that the
Commission eventually made.
In May of this year Copiepresse published the assessment of
Professor Alain Berenboom of the Free University of Brussels about
how much Copiepresse should be paid by Google. Berenboom found that
the losses attributable to that activity were between €32.8 million
and €49.2 million for a single year, and that it would be for the
Court to decide which figure to choose as the damages to be paid to
Copiepresse members.
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