The Belgian newspaper copyright group CopiePresse has filed a suit against the search engine Google Inc. requesting €49 million (US $77 million) in damages for releasing their content without any permission.

The newspaper group requested a provisional payment of €4 million to be made as soon as possible.

CopiePresse has sent all the legal documentation to Google’s U.S. headquarters in Mountain View, California in order for its officials to better understand the reasons for their upcoming Brussels court appearance in September.

Google announced that the legal documents have not yet reached their destination and a careful analysis in required before making an official statement. Still, the company feels that its search engine brings a massive contribution to the traffic of many web sites and also, that its news pages never show more than the headlines, a few lines from the articles and small thumbnail pictures.

According to CopiePresse, Google violated several Belgian copyright laws by reproducing and publishing stories and reports and also by storing full archived stories. The summaries and links featured on Google were from CopiePresse’s Le Soir and La Libre Belgique.

In addition to its initial financial demand, the Belgian group wants a version of the ruling to be published on google.be and news.google.be for a period of 20 days or an additional daily payment of €1 million (US$1.58 million.)

CopiePresse has had similar feuds in the past, settling out of court with Microsoft in 2006 for the same copyright accusations. At the time, Microsoft agreed to remove from its search engines several links to articles in Belgian newspapers.