Who owns the content?

In early September, a Belgian court ruled that Google could not reproduce certain copyrighted titles and summaries on its Belgian Google News Web site. [BW: "Google in Tussle for Digital Rights"] This case could easily be dismissed as a minor incident in a small European market, but it definitely questions the basic premise of online news aggregation, and even search indexing.

Google contends that it observes "fair use" practices and that copyright law allows for snippets of text to be published. Any publisher not wanting to be indexed in Google News can opt out, or use a tool called robots.txt, a widely accepted standard that allows publishers to block items from being indexed. But not being in Google implies loss in traffic coming to their sites. Publishers seem to be perplexed by this conundrum.

The growing concern among publishers is that they're getting eyeballs but little or no revenue from news aggregators. But the end-customers seem to be happy with the likes of Google News. One gets the best news from different sources on a single site. Saves time!

Since Copyright laws aren't harmonized across the world, and what constitutes "fair use" not clearly spelt out, it is a matter of time before there is a showdown between the publsihing world and the world's largest search engine. Will the courts then view Google News as no different from a library's card catalog or consider it as a usurper of someone else's IPR, is something that will determine who owns the content?

I wonder how can laws written decades ago deal with challenges that face businesses in 21st century. There has to be a paradigm shift in how we view the issues facing us in a "flat world".