Microsoft and Google have agreed to remove content managed by Copiepresse of Belgium from their indexes, with Google further being requested to pay nearly $43 million in fines.
report cited Sylvie Irzi, from Microsoft Belgium, who said, "Microsoft does not, for the moment, wish to enter into legal debates with Copiepresse, and is provisionally complying with their requests." Despite the compliance, Microsoft does not necessarily believe Copiepresse is in the right on this issue. But considering how poorly Google fared in court against Copiepresse, Microsoft may be taking the easy road out of this mess. Microsoft also may wish to stay away from negative headlines in Europe. The company has been fighting antitrust officials in the EU, and their case will be heard eventually in the Court of First Instance in Belgium, which is where its appeals will be heard eventually. Google already had to display a copy of the court's decision against it on its Belgian home page for five days. The company fought the requirement, but finally exposed the Belgian court decision in favor of Copiepresse. Google had been ordered to remove "the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press...from all their sites." Google made its displeasure with the decision known in a pair of blog posts from corporate executives. Rachel Whetstone, Google's European director of communication and public affairs, said in September, "(I)f publishers don't want their websites to appear in search results (most do) the robots.txt standard (something that webmasters understand) enables them to prevent automatically the indexing of their content. It's nearly universally accepted and honoured by all reputable search engines." The next day, Google's David Kun, VP for content partnerships, posted
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