Do you see anyone suing Slashdot or Digg? No, because only a fool wouldn't want to appear on such sites because they bring in so much traffic. For many news sites, their entire business model consist of one sentence; "Get on Google News". Google is just the target of lawmakers because its the biggest fish in the ocean and, ironically, they want to make headlines by challenging Google.

Google argues that fair use laws cover what it's doing - it only reproduces a tiny portion of each story, it attributes this snippet to the author and it even links directly to the original text. This argument seems to stand up elsewhere in the world but apparently the Belgians see it differently. It's like suing the phone directory for giving you a free listing. I wonder if they'll ban free advertising completely.

The decision could be a landmark ruling for the web, but I couldn't see too many other news sites rushing out to insist Google take down that free giant billboard.{moscomment}

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