Google being sued by newspapers over publishing content

Online web search engine colossus Google is being sued by Belgian newspapers who claim it is infringing copyright by publishing and archiving their articles.

This follows on from a similar case in the same contry by a French language group who won, forcing Google to take down cached versions of articles from its news service.

It's an interesting case - on the one hand papers and writers have a compelling argument that their copyrighted content is being used by another organisation to make profit for themselves.

After all Google, by providing 'news', although it generates no content whatsoever itself, gains hits, traffic and can sell advertising and other services, so making a profit by operating in a parasitic manner.

On the other hand newspapers are usually desperate to get their articles featured on Google News because it leads to a load of click throughs, increased traffic and so more revenue for them.

On balance most are more than happy to have their content used by search engines in this way, making the lawsuit all the more strange.

Of course they stand to gain from a big fine from Google - and perhaps it's no bad thing - after all why should an organisation effectively stealing content from someone else be allowed to make a profit on the back of it without asking for anyone's permission before publishing?