Google, the internet seach engine, has been told its news service, which assimilates articles from newspapers and other sites, breaches copyright law.

A Brussels court has ruled in favour of a group of Belgian newspapers that argued that Google, which lists links to global news stories, used material without their consent. Google said it had removed the offending content and claimed that its service was “entirely legal”. It will appeal against the decision.

There was “no exception” for Google in copyright law, the Brussels Court of First Instance said, ruling that it must pay a retroactive fine of €25,000 (£16,700) for each day the content remained on the site.

The case, brought by Copiepresse, a group representing 17 French and German language newspapers, including La Libre Belgique and Le Soir, may set a precedent for other newspapers, lawyers said. The group said that Google’s cached links, which refer users to older articles, offered access to content that would usually be paid for by subscription.

"The activities of Google News, the reproduction of headlines as well as short extracts, and the use of Google’s cache, the publicly available data storage of articles and documents, violate the law on authors’ rights,” the ruling said.

Google said its lawyers were still examining the judgment. It was “disappointed” with the decision, saying: “We only ever show headlines, a few snippets of text and thumbnail images. If people want to read the entire story they have to click through to the paper’s website.”

Analysts said they could not understand why Copiepresse, which has filed a similar action against Yahoo!, was pursuing Google. It said newspapers benefited from having stories indexed on search engines, which made their sites more prominent and boosted traffic.

But David Hooper, a partner at Reynolds Porter Chamberlain in London, said the case could prompt similar actions against cache services that let users avoid subscription fees.

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