[sideus]

Agence France Presse Sues Google Over News Site


SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Agence France Presse has sued Google Inc. (GOOG), alleging the Web search leader includes AFP's photos, news headlines and stories on its news site without permission.

The French news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads, according to the suit filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Google was not immediately available for comment. AFP's lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment on the suit.

AFP sells subscriptions to its content and does not provide it free. Google News gathers photos and news stories from around the Web and posts them on its news site, which is free to users.

"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," AFP charged in its lawsuit.

AFP said it has informed Google that it is not authorized to use AFP's copyrighted material as it does and has asked Google to cease and desist from infringing its copyrighted work.

AFP alleged that Google has ignored such requests and as of the filing date of the lawsuit "continues in an unabated manner to violate AFP's copyrights."

© Copyright Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of Reuters Ltd.

Is Google reproducing these images or just providing links to them?

[PurpleGiant]

They should:

a) Have a better login system for their paying members, since this one obviously is lame enough that Google can wander in and see the content.

b) Make use of a simple robots.txt file to let Google know where to, and where not to crawl.

c) Learn more about the internet and search engines.

[Zimphire]

Yes, someone doesn't know how search engines work.

[sideus]

AFP is just shooting themselves in the foot. Googlebot cruises the web and catalogs URL. Google then uses said bot to create a news page from 4000 news based websites. Now, some person visits Google news. Clicks a link that goes to an AFP news article or image. Said user then clicks an ad that may actually generate revenue for AFP.

Basically, AFP is releasing on the Internet news related articles and images and gets upset because some bot catalogs this information. Last time I checked, this is how the WWW works.