Google's legal interactions with American newspapers are well documented; many newspaper believed that Google's link display with headlines and a short summary actually hurt them as people viewed Google's list of links as a summary of the news and deterred readers from actually clicking on the links to view the newspapers' content. Reality dissolved this legal battle, though, as American publishers realized that not being included in Google's outputs would actually be worse than any possible disincentive and thus the case was dropped. But the fight now continues internationally in Brazil, France and Germany (to the largest extent in Brazil, where ~150 newspapers there have pulled themselves from Google's newstream, including some of the largest papers in the market). The same arguments that American newspapers made -- that of "ancillary copyright infringement" through the headlines and summary sentences shown in the links -- are picking up new steam (they argue that google should pay to use titles/sentences from content). What would happen to Google in the US if courts in some of these international countries (who have stronger copyright protections than the US) actually made them pay for this content -- would fair use arguments in the US be revisited?
According to Google, its search engine delivers 4 billion clicks a month to news media outlets, 1 billion of which come from Google News -- this is an amazing amount of reader interaction and will remain the largest source of strength and leverage for Google in any market... Google's large influence remains its greatest source of comfort, but will also continue to keep it in the headlines and in the courtrooms for the foreseeable future, and make it an interesting storyline to monitor.
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