A Belgian court said today it would wait until after the new year to decide whether to uphold an injunction blocking web search giant Google from reproducing snippets of Belgian press reports.
Google, which faces a parallel case in a US court filed by Agence France-Presse, argued yesterday that the injunction, granted by Brussels' Tribunal des Referes, should be cancelled.
Lawyers for Copiepresse, an organisation that manages copyrights for French and German language newspapers and brought the case before the court, countered that Google had no right to make any copy of content without prior consent.
"It will be after the Christmas holidays," the judge told lawyers after a three-hour hearing during which Google lawyers argued that the Belgian Google News service did not infringe on copyright laws. Separately, Google reached a deal with two other groups that had been plaintiffs in the Google News lawsuit in Belgium. Sofam, which represents thousands of Belgian photographers, and Scam, which represents journalists, have agreed to settle for undisclosed terms, a Google spokeswoman said.
"We reached an agreement with them that is going to help us make extensive use of their content in new ways," Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell said. Copiepresse said that versions of news articles that Google stores can be seen using the company's service even after the articles are no longer freely accessible on a newspaper's Web site, a process known as caching.
The two sides indicated after the hearing that they would be open to negotiating an agreement outside of court. Copiepresse general secretary Margaret Boribon, who was present at the hearing, said her organisation was open to talks.