The interest organisation for Danish media companies, Danske Medier, had brought the case against Google on behalf of the Jobindex platform, suing it for breaching copyright, branding and marketing laws.
It demanded that Google admit breaking the law and pay damages of five million kroner to Jobindex.
The case relates to job notices posted on Jobindex, which Danske Medier argued were protected by copyright and therefore could not be published on other platforms, particularly for profit.
It claimed Google was breaching copyright and marketing laws by making job ads posted to Jobindex available on the Google for Jobs service without permission.
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This meant that Google users were able to read Jobindex posts without accessing Jobindex.
However, the Danish trade court, Sø- og Handelsretten on Tuesday found that no copyright laws were infringed in the case.
Jobindex structures its data in a way that enables search engines – in this case Google – to show expanded search results, which in this case comprises the full job notices.
As such, Google’s search engine was showing information which had already been made publicly available by others, and was thereby not breaking copyright laws, the court found.
The court also stated that Google is not a direct competitor of Jobindex and did thereby not break rules related to branding and marketing.
Jobindex is now required to pay 1.7 million kroner in costs.
Google has this year faced criticism outside of Denmark from the publishing sector because of its new AI Overviews service.
Critics say the service, which uses AI to scrape existing media articles to give users a fully formed answer to a query without having to leave Google, breaks a contract because Google is using the intellectual property of media and publishers but no longer enabling website footfall and advertising revenue in return.
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