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French News Agency Sues Google News
n1ywb writes "CNN and others are reporting that 'News agency Agence France Presse has sued Google Inc., 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 Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.' This means they're suing in America this time, not France, which means Google might actually care if they lose."
Even if they're successful, AFP will be the losers here. Why can't people see that far from stealing their customers, Google drives visitors to their sites? By removing themselves from Google, all AFP will do is reduce their number of visitors, and hence the overall value of their site. This is particularly strange as AFP sells subscription based premium content, which isn't available to the masses anyway. Thus the only parts of the site that Google will be able to index are the loss leaders that they use to try and entice people to subscribe. As a business, I'd have thought you'd want that content to be made available to a wider audience at no extra cost to you...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
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.
...why didn't they properly lock it down?
If Agence France Presse didn't want people to view their content for free...
It's not like Google's impersonating a paid user account to get the information!
The coolest voice ever.
Actually, Google news is still in "beta" and it has been for a long time, so they don't actually sell ads. People speculate that one of the reasons that Google news has been in beta for so long is they don't know how they would work the copyright issue if they were a commercial service.....
Monstar L
When you attach your web server to the internet, you're letting everyone look at it.
Part of that process is that people will look at it, classify it and judge it.
It inherent in attaching a web server. If you don't like it, the best thing to do is unplug the ethernet cable from your web server, and tell people to dial directly (or through Minitel) to your server, because you feel that putting it on the internet places you in a difficult position.
I don't see how you can have it both ways...they want wide exposure, so they place it in the most public place on the planet, then they complain that it isn't viewed in precisely the way they envisioned.
I really don't understand the beef.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
How is Google able to access the paid portions of AFP's site without paying?
Simple answer - they cant, and arent. Google only has access to the information that AFP is providing to the public *FOR FREE*. If AFP does not want to provide that information free, they can arrange that by making the proper adjustments to their site.
Heck, if they even want to be snippy, and not provide it *just* to Google, it would take 10 minutes with a robots.txt, or a user-agent check, to block Google from accessing their site. It sounds to me they are more interested in suing than in preventing Google from using them. Or perhaps they dont want to block Google from accessing them, but they want to force Google to pay for doing so.
caveat I'm develop search engines and also worked in a photo agency for some years like AFP.
Bottom line: AFP is right but Google's lack of ads or even full stories on the page should save them.
I just looked at Google News and noticed there is a photo that goes to a story, but there is no photo on the page it links to. The photo must have come from some other news source and the caption "Boston Globe" got pasted below it as a link.
This is maybe good for layout but is contrary to what a photographer would be used to seeing. It probably got them pissed off.
I doubt Google is knowingly copying from AFP. I think they grab any photos they can find. But they will probably find a lot of quality AFP photos. The problem is you don't know who they got it from. And the lack of attribution. That is how AFP makes their money: Copyright control. And guess what? Google uses the work of AFP photographers to make a more visually interesting page for a service that is both free and worth enough money to make an IPO.
Well, this was bound to happen. AFP can probably prove it was an AFP photo, but cannot prove Google copied it from them (and Google likely didn't). It would be useful to include metadata in the photos as to proper credit, url, and policy.
Probably AFP contacted Google, got rebuffed, and then AFP realized that if they don't fight it they will lose control over their online future. Which is true.
But this is really a search engine - you can't actually read the articles there but need to surf elsewhere - and there are no ads, so it can be said that this is a free service.
Anyway it walks a fine line between a search engine and a publication, and the best thing would be if Google could actually sign a contract with Reuters and AFP say, and show large, high quality photos on their site. They could also pay photographers and writers directly which is of course the next step, when Google really goes for the throat. For now it is just a search engine, and Google should be free to make a dynamic layout any way they want, except that it should show accreditation (if in the photo file itself) at least as a mouseover popup label.
I'm not going to guess the outcome, but hope AFP loses badly, otherwise it will be chilling. They ought to be able to demand that Google not index a photo that has an AFP byline embedded in it, but that too is an interpretation we'll have to wait and see about.
"They're a press agency, selling content to newspapers, and -- tada -- web sites. Of course they're not happy about google taking what they sell, for free."
Hmmm. So, they want to block Google news from displaying its headlines. those headlines are displayed on the electronic editions of thousands of newspapers and news sites, worldwide. This leads us to 3 options:
1) It's too difficult to ensure AFP headlines are filtered out. Google News is shut down or signigantly neutered.
2) AFP headlines are filtered out. AFP loses market share and relevance
3) (really, a result of 2) News sites avoid AFP like the plague - they don't much like the idea of AFP driving page views *away* from their sites.
AFP's douchitude affects much more than AFP. It affects their customers (the newspapers). It would do them well to remember that.
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
AFP is selling content to other site. Those sites put the content they have paid for on the free part of their site. Then Google take those information, and put them for free in google news...
AFP is selling content that you can put on your site to attract a public. But to legaly display this content you have to pay AFP, even if other site are putting this content for free on the web.