Google de-indexes Belgium newspaper pages [Update]

Google has removed the French and German Press pages from their search engine index.

Since late last week, some German and French Press pages hosted in Belgium no longer appear in the worlds most used search engine. These sites have been targeted by editors who subscribe to Copiepresse.

In a press release the search giant explained that they had removed from their index editors who write in the French and German languages for daily newspapers in Belgium. Google didn’t just remove these editions from Google News, but erased them completely from their search engine.
 
It is now no longer possible to find daily releases like La Libre Belgique, Le Soir, Sudpresse or l'Avenir via Google. This radical decision has come about due to a fight dating back to 2006 with Copiepresse, with the battle ground being the Google News service.

The Belgium legal system condemned Google for copyright violation at the time for releasing news and content extracts via Google News without the authorisation of Copiepresse which represents subscribing editors. This decision was confirmed in May when legal challenges failed in Brussels Court of Appeal.

Under the threat of being fined up to 25 000 euros for each day they are late, Google has today accepted the decision and has withdrawn all legal challenges. Removing incriminating content doesn’t just stop with the Google News services though.

The question now is whether Google went further than they had to, not just limiting removing information from Google News, but all their services. The judgement indicated that Google had to clean up all postings in in the sense that they were also informed that they had to remove cached information from Google.be and Google.com.

This action against the Belgium newspapers is rather harsh, with it now to be seen how the affected publications go without being referenced by Google. Google has stated that it is "unfortunate" that they have had to take such measures, although they are "open" to all future collaboration with Copiepresse. This should add some pressure to the copyright group...

Update : Belgium newspapers have been reindexed in Google Search.