Belgian papers target Microsoft
Copiepresse, which represents French and German language newspaper editors in Belgium, has sent a letter to Microsoft on their behalf asking that it stop the unauthorised publishing of articles on its "www.msn.be" site.
"Microsoft got in contact with our lawyer yesterday," a spokeswoman for Copiepresse said.
She said that Microsoft often vigorously "defends its intellectual property rights on its software" and that Copiepresse therefore expected proceedings to run more smoothly than with Google.
On September 5, a Belgian lower court ordered Google News to stop reproducing content from French-language and German-language newspapers in Belgium on its Belgian site.
The Californian group, under threat of one-million-euro-a-day fines, more or less complied with that ruling, although there was some grumbling about its archive section.
Google was also liable to pay another half a million euros (625,000 dollars) per day if it failed to publish the ruling on its Belgian site continuously for five days.
Belgian newspapers had attacked Google News at the beginning of the year because the US company had not asked them for permission to use their content – articles, photographs and graphics – and had not paid the publications.
The case in Belgium is being watched by other news providers.
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