Google has won a case against German newspaper and magazine publishers that had been demanding the U.S. company pay royalties for the use of excerpts in its search engine.

The EU's Court of Justice ruled on Thursday that a provision in German copyright law requiring Google to pay for excerpts appearing on its Google News service was invalid because the European Commission had not been notified of the regulation.

"A German provision prohibiting internet search engines from using newspaper or magazine snippets without the publisher's authorisation must be disregarded in the absence of its prior notification to the Commission," the court judgment said.

The publishers previously said they were demanding as much as one billion euros ($1.1 billion) in copyright fees from Google for their news snippets and other items the company published on the web.

German publishers are not alone in their quest to be compensated. Others, too, have been seeking a share of the revenues earned from the distribution of their news products on such services as Google News and YouTube.

The court ruled that the provision in Germany's "Leistungsschutzgesetz", introduced in 2013, which required Google to get permission from newspaper and magazine publishers, was a "technical regulation" under EU legislation on internet services. Therefore, the European Commission should have been notified, the court said.

The court found that because the provision was targeted at infringements by internet service providers, it fell under the scope of EU umbrella legislation.

The case, brought by German copyright management company VG Media, a consortium of about 200 publishers, marked the latest clash in the ongoing legal battle between publishers and Google over what the publishers see as the U.S. company's free use of their copyrighted content.

The Association of German Newspaper Publishers, the BDZV, said in a statement that the court's decision was "irritating" because six years had passed since the German law took effect and publishers and editors were "still waiting for Google and other digital platforms to pay for the use of publishers' content".

Since VG Media lodged its complaint, the EU has agreed to an overhaul of its copyright legislation. In April this year, the EU toughened its copyright rules, forcing Google to pay publishers for news snippets and Facebook to filter out protected content. The bloc's 28 members must implement those regulations in the next two years.

The BDZV called on the German government to implement the new EU copyright rules to bring certainty to the sector.

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