Upholding an earlier ruling, a Brussels court found after a year-long legal battle that the California-based company had "violated copyright" rules and ordered it to remove the papers' content from its sites. The court ruled that "by reproducing on its Google News site articles and short extracts from articles, Google reproduces and communicates to the public works protected by copyright." Google said in Paris that it would appeal against the decision.

"Google regrets today's decision and will appeal," said Google News legal counsel for Europe Yoram Elkaim in Paris. "We continue to believe that the Google News service conforms with copyright law and benefits publishers as much as Internet users," he said.

The president of the Copiepresse grouping of Belgium's French-language newspapers, Margaret Boribon, said the group did not intend to keep up the legal battle "for the fun of it" and preferred to "negotiate" a settlement. A year ago Copiepresse lodged a Belgian lawsuit against Google News to require the Internet group to request permission from Copiepresse and to pay it to show its articles on the Google News site. On September 5, a Belgian court ordered Google News to stop reproducing content from French-language and German-language newspapers in Belgium on its Belgian Web siteWeb site and imposed fines as long as it did not respect the decision. In that ruling, the court told the company to pay Copiepresse a million euros (1.3 million euros) per each day that the forbidden articles, pictures and graphics appeared on its site.

In February 13's decision, the judge backed Google's claim that the fines were "disproportionate" and reduced them to a more "reasonable" 25,000 euros per day. Copiepresse lawyer Bernard Magrez said that meant Google would no longer have to pay a total of 130 million euros but three million euros. AFP; February 13, 2007