EU copyright and database right In March 2005,
Agence France-Presse (AFP) sued Google for $17.5 million, alleging that Google News infringed on its copyright because "Google includes AFP's photos, stories and news headlines on Google News without permission from Agence France Presse". It was also alleged that Google ignored a
cease and desist order, though Google counters that it has opt-out procedures which AFP could have followed but did not. Google made arrangements, starting in August 2007, to host Agence France-Presse news, as well as the
Associated Press,
Press Association and the
Canadian Press. In 2007, Google announced it was paying for Associated Press content displayed in Google News, however the articles are not permanently archived. That arrangement ceased on December 23, 2009 when Google News ceased carrying Associated Press content. In 2007, a preliminary injunction and then a Belgian court ruled that Google did not have the right to display the lead paragraph from French-language Belgian news sources when Google aggregated news stories, nor to provide free access to cached copies of the full content ("in cache" feature), due to both copyright and
database rights. Google responded by removing the publications both from Google News and the main Google web search. According to the 2009
Report on the outlook for copyright in the EU: In May 2011 the ruling was upheld in appeal after Google reiterated most legal defences from the first grade plus some new ones, which the Court rejected based on the
Infopaq ruling and others. In July 2011, Copiepress publications were restored on Google News after they requested so and renounced any complaint based on the judgement. Nevertheless, in a 2017 briefing on the
ancillary copyright for press publishers paid by the
European Commission, Prof. Höppner thought the database right was not violated by most platforms on the basis that the "substantial part" criterion may be too high a bar after the 2002 decision in
Fixtures Marketing v. OPAP and that no publisher was known to have won a case with it.
Compensation for disseminating access to news The 2019
Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market requires Google News to license content from news sites. As of June 2023, Google had reached copyright licensing agreements with 1,500 publications in order to come into compliance with the Directive. Lobbying by Europe-based news outlets goes back to at least the 2010s. In Germany, their lobbying led to the introduction of the
ancillary copyright for press publishers in 2013. In October 2014, a group of German publishers granted Google a license to use snippets of their publications
gratis; the group had first claimed that such snippets were illegal, and then complained when they were removed by Google. In December 2014, Google announced it would be shutting down the Google News service in
Spain. A new law in Spain, lobbied for by the Spanish newspaper publishers' association
AEDE, required for news aggregators to pay news services for the right to use snippets of their stories on Google News. Google chose to shut down their service and remove all links to Spain-based news sites from international versions of the site. The Spanish version reopened in 2022, after Spain transposed the 2019 European Union copyright rule into national law, enabling media outlets to negotiate with tech companies rather than imposing a mandatory fee system. In 2012, Brazil's National Association of Newspapers (AJN) jointly pulled out of allowing their content to be shown on Google News. The change resulted in only a "negligible" drop in traffic In October 2020, Google announced a new program known as "Showcases", in which the company would pay publishers to curate featured news content displayed in branded panels on Google News and Discover. Showcases may occasionally include free access to paywalled content. The program was first launched in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The feature's launch in Australia came amid the implementation of the country's
News Media Bargaining Code; Google stated that it believed the Showcase program was in compliance with the Code. In response to the
Online News Act, Google announced it would block all Canadian news sites from visitors located in Canada, when the act goes into effect near the end of 2023. ==Features and customization==