A Belgian court has told Google they can no longer add news stories form Belgian, French and German news papers. If Google does not stop adding the news content to its service, Google will be fined $1.27 million dollars per day.

This might be looked at as a major legal victory for author rights in the copyright field, but the news sources are loosing not only publicity from their stories being featured in one of the largest read news portals on the planet, but also they are loosing out on much needed and coveted inbound links from one of the most trusted sources on the web, Google News. It will be interesting to see if the web sites from those affected will decrease for high traffic terms. My guess is, this will happen rather quickly, and this so called legal victory, may turn into a marketing disaster!