I had not paid much attension to the news about a Belgium court ruling against Google for crawling and indexing Belgium news sites (which are protected by copyright).  However, upon reading a post by Ross Dunn on The SEO Blog this ruling could have major implications for both Google and News sites in the near future.

"This ruling signifies a strong precedent for other newspapers to follow and ultimately brings up a tempting legal option for all of those sue-happy “people” out there; “if my site is copyrighted… can I sue Google for indexing it?” The fact is newspapers with an online presence are bound to jump in on the action and try to get a little financial love from the major search engines and precedent like this just urges them on.

Danny Sullivan published an extremely informative article today where he describes his interview with the Belgian group that led this successful case against Google. In this article he notes that Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut to the chase and sensibly summarized this legal nightmare as “business negotiation being done in a courtroom.” I must agree because there is no question the path news companies are taking to get their needs met is ass-backwards."

However ‘"newspapers make money by getting free exposure from search giants like Google. Now they are biting the hand that feeds them".

I see it more as companies wanting to make some money off of Google by making Google pay for crawling the content of the site.  If Google had to pay each site that it crawls, something, it would soon be out of business.