Google relents and posts Belgian court ruling on its website

Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) initially didn't want to comply with a Belgian court's ruling that it post a copy of a recent court case on its site, but Google finally relented while still vowing to fight the Belgian case. The Belgian government is apparently furious with Google over the search leader's position at its Google News service, which simply aggregates public information from websites around the world into a centralized location for ease-of-use by readers.

Now, although some disagree with me, let me make a point. If Google News is just "another" service that takes pieces of news (not whole stories) and posts them in an automated fashion to a news aggregation site, then shouldn't the search leader be the target of *every party* who turns up in the Google normal search index? This is a huge double standard if you ask me.

I'm quite sure that if I search for "Chevrolet" at Google right now, I'll find millions of search query results, with most of the results containing pieces of copyrighted verbiage about Chevrolet. What makes one copyright that's potentially infringed by a search result different than a copyright that's potentially infringed by a news search result? Maybe Google should have an "opt out of the index" selection, but who is complaining about being included in the normal Google search index? Very, very few. In fact, most companies would sue Google if all of a sudden they were excluded from Google search.

Let's go one step further -- say you operate a public RSS news feedreader, echoing what Google essentially does with its Google News service. An RSS newsreader pulls copyrighted material into a centralized reading format in one location, just like Google News does. What's the difference here? Sure, Google News is used and read by millions of readers, but so can public RSS newsreader websites, especially those with "shared" reading lists. Is Google News any different? In the eyes of the Belgian court, maybe it is since Google is so popular -- hence, unfairly targeted. What else is new here. The EU has been after Microsoft with a pitchfork recently, so why not another giant by the Belgian government -- Google?