Google News Sued by Agence France Presse
Google News, Google’s news aggregation service which recently added new personalization features, has been sued by Agence France Presse. Agence France Presse alleges that Google includes AFP’s photos, stories and news headlines on Google News without permission from Agence France Presse. AFP is seeking damages of around $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying its copyrighted material.
The law suit was filed this week on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The basis around the law suit is that Agence France Presse sells subscriptions to its new content. Google News however crawls photos and news stories from AFP, posts the stories on Google News, and then Google News readers clcik over to the AFP site. Although this may sound good for traffic to AFP and the possibility of selling new subscriptions, one problem seems to be that Google News indexes the entire news story from a site, unlike RSS syndication which only indexes an excerpt.
“Without AFP’s authorization, defendant is continuously and willfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP’s photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News web pages,” Rueters reported that Agence France Presse charged in its lawsuit.
Agence France Presse has apparently informed Google that Google News is not authorized to use AFP’s copyrighted material as it does and had requested Google to cease and desist from infringing its copyrighted work.
They don’t like it? They should lock the robot out of their server.
once again a french company thinks that they have any idea what is going on in the world. that website probably gets 75% of it’s traffic from google. google is the best thing that ever happened to the internet, i take it very personally when fools talk smack about or sue google with no reason.
it blows my mind but it seems the lawyers in france are even stupider than the ones here in america!
AFP is indulging in a suicidal action. There is a danger that GOOGLE’s goodness of intentions in spreading the word is being mis-interpreted by AFP. There is a fear that many others might follow the same course, if AFP wins a damage suit.
This is obviously not an issue with Google. Google is simply a search utility. The agency that is doing the complaining should take measures to tighten up their information security instead of waisting time and money on a worthless lawsuit.
Forget the French vs. US characterization. Both companies have a legitimate right to profit from their work and when these rights collide and no agreement can be reached, it’s time to go to court. Copyright vs. technological reach, burden of defense vs. self restraint, this decision will have potentially far reaching consequences.