By Wendy Tanaka

Belgium has no love for Google, and the animus could soon spread across Europe. The Internet search king last week lost a Belgian copyright lawsuit brought by a group of Belgian newspapers that insisted the U.S. company remove headlines, summaries, and thumbnail images posted on its news site without their permission.

The ruling, which Google plans to appeal, could set an ominous precedent and spark a European revolt against the Mountain View, California-based company, according to industry observers. “If this signals a direction that other European countries follow, then look out,” says Anthony Falzone, executive director of the Fair Use Project, an Internet research program at StanfordUniversityLawSchool.

More important, the rulings could force Yahoo, Ask.com, and other search engines to remove news headlines and snippets from their sites, potentially altering the very nature of what search engines do: aggregate vast amounts of information and link results to other web sites. A similar suit filed against Google by French news service Agence France-Presse in 2005 is still pending and might be bolstered by the Belgian rulings.

“This could have a broader implication and throw the Internet into disarray,” says Mark Kesslen, a Lowenstein Sandler partner who specializes in intellectual property law. “The Internet is all about aggregating data.”

The court’s decision, which upheld an earlier ruling, also heaped whopping fines on Google, ordering the company to pay 25,000 euros, or $32,500, to Copiepresse, the Brussels copyright group representing the 17 plaintiff papers, for each day the Google News and Google.be sites displayed search results containing the papers’ content.

Google has long maintained that indexing content on its news site and linking to news organizations’ web sites does not violate copyright laws. The search engine, which removed all links to the Belgian papers last fall, says it shouldn’t be “legally compelled” to remove content from its sites. Google says a content provider need only ask to have its materials removed, and the search engine will do so immediately.

Money Grab?The ruling could put pressure on Google to reach a revenue-sharing agreement with the Belgian news groups, which observers suggest is an attempt to get their hands on a piece of Google’s $10 billion in online advertising revenues. Belgian papers might think “Google is making more money from ads than the newspapers are,” says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information. Says Stanford’s Mr. Falzone: “It strikes me as a search for a deep pocket.”

Google says it doesn’t know the newspapers’ intentions, nor would it disclose ad revenue or search traffic figures in Belgium and Europe. But the search giant says it helps drive traffic to papers, so it doesn’t understand why European papers would want to be excluded from search results. “Many more people want to be included than removed from Google News,” says Google Senior Counsel Michael Kwun.

And even if all of Europe gangs up on Google, copyright experts say the fallout won’t spread across the Atlantic to the United States because copyright laws there differ vastly. “In the U.S., there’s a recognition... that search engines are good,” says Ms. Samuelson. “They provide consumers with more access. The sites they link to are benefited, too. Google is matching consumers with the producers. From a utilitarian calculus, that’s important.” Europeans, she says, have much stronger author’s rights laws that allow content creators to control distribution.

The final outcome in the Belgian courts, after all appeals have been reviewed, is probably months, or even years, away. Mr. Falzone’s advice? “European countries have to be careful in what they do,” he says. “If they make it too onerous for Google to operate there, Google could just say, ‘the heck with it.’”