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."

Comments

AFP will be the ones to lose

[Tet]

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...

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[pbranes]

Exactly they are shooting themselves in the foot. This is just like Apple suing their fan base, and other companies suing sites for deep linking - all of this merely reduces their fan base and reduces their advertisement dollars - they are the losers.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[ccady]

I'll play the devil's advocate: If you had a product, wouldn't you want to be able to control where it is advertised? Pretend you don't like Google, and think that it presents your product in a bad light (those tiny little images and all, right next to competitors' images.) Shouldn't you have a right to tell them to remove the ad?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[IO ERROR]

Some people are stupid. AFP seems to be stupid.

However, the CNN article does state that AFP asked to be removed from Google News and that Google did not remove them, thus the lawsuit.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[zemoo]

AFP is like the AP and Reuters in that they are a News Agency, not a news outlet. They primarily sell their content to other outlets, such as CNN. Having individuals directly read their content is simply not important.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[pbranes]

I differ in opinion with you. Can a company force gamespot.com to down a negative review of their game? No. Can a company force cnn.com to not report bad news about them? No. It's freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you got that wrong. AFP doesn't have a "news site" to speak of. AFP licenses its stuff to OTHER news sites, but keeps the copyright. Google links to site X. This is advantageous to site X, we agree, but AFP gets to decide whether it's advantageous to THEM as they own the copyright.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Surazal]

Fair use allows Google to do Google News in the first place. Sure, some people may *want* that control. That doesn't mean they automatically get it. Also, Google News does not have ads, check for yourself: yourself

It's that kind of thinking that got SCO in its current position. I honestly don't think AFP has a chance on this one. That's my personal opinion. :^)

Disclaimer: I am not a blah blah blah...

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[ccady]

It will come down to that. Is Google news really a review? I don't think so--it is a small size picture and the first few lines of the article. There is no "review" content that is being generated. And the only reason Google is doing that is to drive traffic through the Google site.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Stonehand]

I'm not at all positive that fair use applies.

It's not personal use; it's being redistributed to the whole world.

It's not editorial use, because Google isn't writing -about- the articles.

It's not educational use, because there's no broader educational context in which Google can claim to be using this for teaching or research purposes.

And it's commercial, because they're using this to get viewers to access their other services which DO have advertising, as eyeballs are their business model.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[jacksonj04]

robots.txt?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[mrdlcastle]

If this is the case, then why spend the money to post your stories on your own site.
I can see having a site that gives customers information about what they provide, but why post any news at all (even posting old news would work, because you just want your clients to see what you can produce).

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[fleener]

Where's your data proving that Google News drives users to AFP's site? I mean, besides reading an isolated story, sucking up bandwidth, and leaving?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Surazal]

I'm not at all positive that fair use applies.
It's not personal use; it's being redistributed to the whole world.
It's not editorial use, because Google isn't writing -about- the articles.
It's not educational use, because there's no broader educational context in which Google can claim to be using this for teaching or research purposes.
And it's commercial, because they're using this to get viewers to access their other services which DO have advertising, as eyeballs are their business model.

If the facts are as simple as you say then this will be one very short court case. ;^)

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[ElGanzoLoco]

No, wait, you don't understand what AFP is: it is a news provider, like Reuters, they don't really care if people go to their website or not, it is completely marginal in their business. Their job is to sell news (pictures / text) to other media (newspapers, radios, websites etc), which can then use it directly (reprint it) or use it as a basis for more complete, analytical articles.

So AFP does not really care how much coverage their content gets for free, in fact it is threatening as it "devaluates" the content: now anybody (and more importantly, any media) can have access to most of AFP's content minutes after it is broadcast, without paying for the (probably huge) monthly bill newspapers pay to AFP. (medias pay to get the right to access to AFP's network, through specific software and servers).

The fact is that Google is indexing and displaying that content without paying for it. But Google can (rightfully) argue that they are only indexing other websites (ie the newspapers who have paid for AFP content and displaying it as is on their own websites), and that therefore they're not violating any copyright law. But in the eyes of AFP, Google is using their content in an original form, displaying it on their own website, with their own layout.

So both companies have mostly valid arguments.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[sqlrob]

And the number of ads (and hence the amount of income generated for that traffic) on the google news page is exactly what?

(hint: it's about the same as the probability of Windows XP getting GPL'ed by the end of the year)

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[GeckoX]

None of that matters a shit.

Google links to publicly accessible content hosted on publicly accessible websites, period.

AFP posts content to their publicly accessible website, and lo and behold it's linked to.

If AFP doesn't like the way they're doing business, then they should change it. I think they'd be hard pressed to be a successful news service though if they refused access to all of their news.

As has already been aluded to, this is so SCO it's not even funny. There is no case.

Now, even given that, maybe the best thing Google could do is abide by the AFP's request. Give them what they wish for. I probably won't even notice their stories disappearing from Google News, but I'm sure they'd notice their disappearing readership.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Yurka]

I am not sure they care that much. French press (pun unintended), including AFP, is heavily subsidized in various ways, including direct cash from the government (not entirely like BBC, but still). They'll survive. And there's the additional benefit of sticking it to the evil American corporations, even if the nose comes off in the process of spiting the face.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Jackhamr]

Mod this up (I think).

Wouldn't the robot.txt file prevent Google from searching the page?

Wouldn't that fix this whole problem?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[iamvego]

Even if you play devil's advocate, can they justifiably say they have lost over $17m in damages?

So many companies destroy their image by suing over something which really doesn't damage them. They usually have to claim a lot from the court case to cover what they'll lose from off-put would-be customers. Apple are good at shooting themselves in the face.

I wouldn't be surprised if this happened:

Company A: "Company B is cool!"

Company B: "RIGHT! We're gonna sue you for millions for using our name without our permission!"

Company A: "But we thought.."

Company B: "Well you thought wrong moron. Hasn't it cottoned on that we don't want anyone to like us as we're deluded enough to think all good publicity is lethal to our business."

(word gets out about the suing and Company B sales hit rock bottom)

Company B: "Hey, *you* caused this to happen by making us sue you. We're gonna sue you REAL good this time! That'll learn ya!"

(company A folds)

(next day, Company B folds)

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Pig Hogger]

It's only LINKING.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[alienw]

Most court cases could be decided in about half an hour if the court system didn't take its sweet time about everything.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[LordEd]

I found their robots.txt file:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /beta
Disallow: /francais/news
Disallow: /english/news

Now... was this present before or after the lawsuit started, and is google news the same as normal indexing?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[mmkkbb]

When was the last time you looked the Google News front page?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[operagost]

Just in case you weren't just trolling:

Apple can pursue fan site sources

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Ohreally_factor]

Apple is suing the freetype project, according to slashdot.

Complete myth. See the Freetype patent FAQ. Scroll down to the bottom.

Yes, slashdot reported on this hoax, but actually corrected the story, in their usual wavering manner.

Even if it were true, would you say that the Freetype Project was composed primarily of Apple users and fans?

It's a good thing you posted as AC, so the world doesn't realize what a dumbshit you are. Oh, wait. You might not realize it, but odds are that most people around you already know this about you.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[10101001 10101001]

No, for the same reason that Coca-Cola shouldn't be able to prevent McDonalds from selling Coke and Pepsi products. Coca-Cola can try all sorts of legal means to stop it, like not selling to them directly. But I question the legality of signing those they sell to to not resell to McDonalds. At least in the sale of copyrighted works, that'd not be legal as specified under First Sale Doctrine. Of course in this case there's no actual sale going on. The real issue, as others have stated, is the question of fair use.

To put it in simpler terms, do you not think fair use should exist? It's that which allows for things like reviews of products which almost certainly place some in a "bad light". If you want to argue that this isn't fair use, first read my post below.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[10101001 10101001]

It'd help if you'd actually use the guidelines specified for valuing if a work is covered under fair use.

Quotes from US Code Title 17, 107:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include

So, right away Google seems cleared. But, lets make it more clear since something like blatant plagiarism of a whole news paper would likely not be protected.

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

Contrary to your claim, Google News isn't commercial. Your logic that a non-profit action attracts attention/money isn't relevant. By your logic no celebrity would have access to fair use since their non-profit statements would attract attention to them and conceivably make more money. The test is for if the work itself is commercial. Google News doesn't make money.

Second, Google News is for providing access to news. To claim news is uneducational in general is to ignore what news is. Now, if Google News started quoting from press releases by companies or one of the Government produced "news" releases, you'd have a much stronger argument. Such is propaganda and propaganda is not educational except in the general case that knowing what to look for it in propaganda.

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

The original was news as well.

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

Only the first paragraph is copied, normally, as well as a blurb picture. That's a relatively small part of most reports.

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

This is the real crux that I think exhaunerates Google. Just like Slashdot or fark, Google News redirects to pages in a way that if anything *increases* the market for the work. It's unlikely I'd ever even see a fraction of the news papers listed on Google News if it weren't for Google. Google News doesn't replace all these news sites. It's a nexus for finding them.

The funniest part is that Google already does the same thing with their search page. They include a small blurb and a link to the original site. While the Google Cache is likely dice, from the perspective of ad revenue being the market provider, search engines in general haven't really been questioned before. Google News is merely a search engine specifically geared towards news. If Google News is commit some illegal act by linking to news stories and including a blurb then so are most store catalogs, search engines, and tons of databases of information (lots of things one makes are copyrighted, after all).

So, I sincerely fear for what such would mean.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Ohreally_factor]

Do you know the difference between suing and subpoenaing?

And will you people make up your mind? Are these fan sites or news sites?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[PhatboySlim]

I can give you 17.5 million reasons why they want to sue google.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[yomahz]

Now... was this present before or after the lawsuit started

Looks like it was there before (unless they manually modified the TS, which is kinda silly).

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 18:10:51 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Expires: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 18:15:51 GMT
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Feb 2005 10:54:38 GMT
ETag: "761b2-4f-421c60ee"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 79
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/plain

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /beta
Disallow: /francais/news
Disallow: /english/news

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[sjames]

Shouldn't you have a right to tell them to remove the ad?

They have every right to declere their wishes using robots.txt. Why they don't do that is an open question.

Way too many suits like this are nothing more than companies refusing to follow the conventions of the web. It's analogous to the conventions for entering a business. That is, if the door isn't locked, the lights are on, and no sign saying closed is on the door, we presume we may enter freely. It's not reasonable to sue someone for not knocking first under those conditions.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[yomahz]

Fair Use

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: "quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported."

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Random832]

They're suing in the US. US laws apply. If they wanted french laws to apply, they can sue in France, and google then could go about their business.

If they want to play in our court, they play by our rules.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[has2k1]

I do not think AFP looked that far before they filed the law suit. Or maybe they did, I cannot be sure, but I bet what they surely looked at was the money they could extract from the successful search giant.

Actually, they could even have facilitated this in one way or another, ok I am not a website king, but isn't there a way one can block the google web crawlers from indexing the material on there websites?

If AFP are successful in extorting even afew dollars from google, this could lead to an avalanche of suits against search companies.
Think about it, set up site -> register with search engines or use the right meta tags -> claim the search engine went beyond the limits -> sue and get rich.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[NoOneInParticular]

Now... was this present before or after the lawsuit started, ...

It was, leaves open the question if this is normal indexing, but google does seem to disregard robots.txt for indexing news.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[_Sprocket_]

And it's commercial, because they're using this to get viewers to access their other services which DO have advertising, as eyeballs are their business model.

Sure - Google has Adwords. That depends on eyeballs. But I wonder how much of Google's business is entirely eyeballs. We bought a googlebox partly because of Google's existing services and reputation as an information aggregator.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[geminidomino]

How do you know that was before the lawsuit started? Nowhere in TFA does it say when the lawsuit was filed, and that date is barely 3 weeks ago.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[duffahtolla]

It's not a review, it's a summary.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[joak]

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . for purposes such . . . news reporting

It doesn't put Google in the clear at all. Google is distributing, not reporting.

Basically this clause means that if I want to report that Dan Rather was wrong about Bush's Guard papers, I can. It doesn't mean I can rebroadcast CBS news because I'm using it for "news" purposes.

At least you went on, and I'll agree it's a grey area. Some more responses:

Contrary to your claim, Google News isn't commercial.

Huh? They are part of Google, a very commercial company. "No adds directly on the page" doesn't mean non-commerical.

Only the first paragraph is copied, normally, as well as a blurb picture. That's a relatively small part of most reports.

A picture is usually a copyrighted work in its own right, so it's 100% of the work there.

As for the text, I'm not sure, but the first paragraph is the essentials of the following work for journalism, so it could be argued it's substantial.

[redirecting helping the market] is the real crux that I think exhaunerates Google.

No. The news-producers often make money by re-selling their reporting to other producers (ie, your local paper runs NY Times stories). And definitely so for photos. That market is damaged if AFP stories are distributed free by Google.

There are other damages also: for example, by reprinting the first paragraph, some portion of users will feel that's "enough" information and not feel the need to visit the real site. And Google's product certainly competes with one essential marketing tool of a newspaper: the front page.

The funniest part is that Google already does the same thing with their search page

Not really, there are several differences. Not least of which is anyone can opt out of their search engine.

Overall, the balance may be that Google's usage is OK, but I'd be mildly surprised.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[PMuse]

US Code Title 17, 107: Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

So, right away Google seems cleared.
If some prime minister makes a speech, it's fair use to quote text from the speech in order to report the news. The "news reporting" exception isn't designed to allow quoting of AFP's article about the speech. Put another way, the fact that AFP wrote an article isn't news being reported and doesn't trigger this exception. Go write your own article.

Contrary to your claim, Google News isn't commercial.
Yet. It's not making money yet. Isn't it interesting that they don't sell ads on that page or provide google cache links?

Your point about celebrities is hard to follow, but it's worth noting that they can't use a copyrighted work to attract attention to their causes any more than anyone else can. They need a license to sing "Happy Birthday" like everyone else. [insert long, off topic rant here]

To claim news is uneducational in general is to ignore what news is.
You don't seriously think that the "educational use" exception covers every quotation from which some one might learn something, do you? If you're not a school or a teacher, you'll have a hard, hard time claiming that you're making an "educational use" of a copyrighted work. That exception exists so that schools can function without hiring more lawyers than teachers.

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
AFP is in the news website business. So is Google. If AFP wants to use it's content to gain eyeballs and Google is taking the eyeballs away, AFP has been damaged. Whether Google has taken enough of the work to infringe, that's yet to be decided.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[compm375]

A summary with brief quotations is allowed. Google just has the quotes. They didn't make summaries of the articles.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[MutantHamster]

Sure, they should have the right. We should all have the right to be a dumbass.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[teknokracy]

I love how Google still reports on itself. The irony would be if the linked article was in fact an AFP article, with AFP pictures of their headquarters!

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[mikkom]

By removing themselves from Google, all AFP will do is reduce their number of visitors, and hence the overall value of their site.

AFP is a news agency, not a magazine or web site. They get their money by selling news articles to publishers, not by displaying advertisements.

I can totally understand why they don't want one company using their material without paying while their customers do pay for the same material.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[KinkifyTheNation]

Pretend you don't like Google

This is France, of course they don't like Google!

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[opusman]

Google aren't the ones doing the news reporting though. That's AFP, in this case. Google are news reproducing, if anything.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[10101001 10101001]

Put another way, the fact that AFP wrote an article isn't news being reported and doesn't trigger this exception.

Maybe if it was bundled in other articles they wrote, I'd agree. But the whole function of Google News is reporting about the news of others. Well, Google News is closer to a catalog of news. So, maybe they need to do a bit more reporting..

Your point about celebrities is hard to follow, but it's worth noting that they can't use a copyrighted work to attract attention to their causes any more than anyone else can. They need a license to sing "Happy Birthday" like everyone else. [insert long, off topic rant here]

You're missing my point. The grandparent poster was claiming that Google News getting traffic meant Google was as well. But that doesn't make Google News innately commercial. As another example, think of the various non-profit organizations which are funded by commercial entities. Just become somewhere along the line some organization benefits indirectly doesn't make the whole thing tainted with being a commercial enterprise. I'm sorry if my celebrity example wasn't clear on that point.

You don't seriously think that the "educational use" exception covers every quotation from which some one might learn something, do you?

No. I never said anything of the kind. The point was that news is education. If Google News was including snippits of music, I don't think that could be claimed to be educational. But certainly snippits of news reports is educational. I agree that at least one reason for this exception was the realization that schools would possibly not be able to afford what they need in copyrighted works (and I kind of wonder why whole textbooks haven't fallen under this scope, seeing as how it'd please most everyone but the textbook makers), but the fair use rules don't actually state "for school use". It doesn't seem hard, to me, to argue that news is educational.

If AFP wants to use it's content to gain eyeballs and Google is taking the eyeballs away, AFP has been damaged.

That's a hard argument to make, though. That's basically claiming that people go to Google News to avoid going to AFP because the one paragraph snippit that Google News takes is sufficient. The truth is, Google News' largest conceivable negative effect on AFP's market is exposing said market's audience to many other papers and that audience reading those other papers instead of one with AFP articles. If people are going to Google News for news, then without Google News they'd probably choose a newspaper without AFP. And if they're using Google News as a gateway to news sites, then it's only improving AFP's market.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[nebby]

I haven't posted on /. in like a year, but just wanted to note that everyone should read the above comment, as it actually analyzes the situation objectively and doesn't just make broad assumptions about the intentions of either side, like all the other comments here.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[belmolis]

Fair Use is an aspect of US copyright law. The suit is under French law. Not all countries have a fair use exception in their copyright law. In particular, according to this law journal article:

the French copyright law limits the "economic rights" of authors in specifically enumerated cases but does not recognize a broad fair use privilege.

This is one area in which US law is better for the consumer than the law of many other countries.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[belmolis]

Oops, the suit is in a US court. That may mean that they are confident enough that this isn't fair use under US law that they didn't need the advantage of French law. It is also possible that they intend to argue that by virtue of being a party to the Berne Convention, the US is obligated to harmonize its law with that of the other signatories, and that in effect French law governs anyhow.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[C10H14N2]

Because Google is trying to set the game to where they are allowed to violate the copyrights of millions of sites in order to produce what they do, but then THEY turn around and claim copyright on the result and have written TsOS that are utterly absurd in that context.

I've been waiting for such a lawsuit. I agree with you, but Google need to be honest that they wouldn't have a product if they didn't do on a massive scale what they forbid anyone from doing, even on an individual scale. Go read their API TOS, where, seriously, they forbid "any automated searching" or the republishing of the results. Well what the @#ck is an API for then?

They need to be challenged so that the law and their business practices are compatible. Utility simply is not an excuse for blatant disregard for rights and law.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[LMariachi]

They already have that control. It's called "robots.txt" and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than bringing this suit. And I'd be surprised if Google didn't have some existing procedure whereby a news provider could request to be excluded from their aggregator.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> If you had a product, wouldn't you want to be able to control where it is advertised?

Would I want to? Sure, power is great! Could I? No way. Let's pretend I have a movie, but some particular critic doesn't like the movie and gives it thumbs down. Do I have the right to tell that critic not to "advertise" my movie? No. Or was McDonalds able to stop all the free "advertising" in Super Size Me? No.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[martin-boundary]

You're half right.

AFP doesn't care about eyeballs, as they, together with Reuters etc. provide the news source material. Worldwide news gathering is very expensive and requires many local connections, so that organizations like AFP have a natural monopoly. It matters not at all what ordinary people might think of AFP: if they want to read world news in their local newspapers and television programmes, they need AFP, becasue without AFP (and Reuters..) there is nothing.

Google is wrong, because they are using a substantial amount of AFP's copyrighted products without paying for them. Copyright doesn't just disappear after an item is sold once. Copyright gives AFP rights to dictate the use of their material no matter how many times it is disseminated, including when Google picks it up from some public website and copies it onto their own archives to show web surfers.

If Google only used an AFP photo or news report once in a while, that would be fair use. But Google serves millions of users, and together that means they reproduce probably the full and complete AFP material in one way or another, which is way, way beyond fair use and well into stealing.

What Google should do is negotiate distribution rights with AFP, so they can pay a blanket fee per month to use all the AFP material they like, just like magazines and newspapers do.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Khalid]

Indeed !! lemonde.fr one of the main french sites asked google news to remomve them, non they are back, they have probably reached the conclusion that they have more to gain than to loose from being listed there.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Donny Smith]

RTFA.

They show AFP's freaking photos, how is that "only linking"?

Last time I checked it was called "image theft", leaching and such.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Minna Kirai]

In terms of copyright legality, Google News is no different from normal Google web search, except that it updates faster (and purges faster too). Both of them download web pages and give users small bits of those pages combined on one page so the searcher can preview the one she wants.

There is no "review" content that is being generated.

Meaningless. If a Google employee wrote a paragraph blurb reviewing each linked article, the legalilty of using a small piece of the webpage would be unaffected.

And the only reason Google is doing that is to drive traffic through the Google site.

Meaningless. The only reason Rogert Ebert writes thousands of movie reviews is to drive traffic to his website (and newspaper column, and TV show). The infringer's motivation is unimportant.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Minna Kirai]

But I question the legality of signing those they sell to to not resell to McDonalds.

That wouldn't be illegal, but it would be impossible. The seller can ask them to sign a contract for whatever he wants- but if the contract is significant, then it means he's not really selling at all, but indefinitely leasing.

Contracts toremove First Sale rights happen millions of times per year. We call them "Non-Disclosure Agreements".

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Minna Kirai]

How to contradict yourself in two little sentences.

1. Mention TWO companies in the same industry:
AFP doesn't care about eyeballs, as they, together with Reuters etc. provide the news source material.

2. Claim that one of those companies is a MONOpoly:
that organizations like AFP have a natural monopoly.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Minna Kirai]

And will you people make up your mind?

That sentence typically indicates you are attempting to construct a false dichotomy. Ex: "Will you make up your mind? Do you think Saddam Hussein is evil, or George W. Bush is stupid?"

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[Ohreally_factor]

It was a bit flip, and honestly there is no reason that a site can't be both. However, there is a dichotomy between saying Apple is suing it's fans (or it's customers) and Apple is destroying our first amendment rights by suing investigative journalists.

AFAIK, the poster never made the second claim, so I am guilty of using an underhanded rhetorical strategy. Mea Culpa, and thank you for noticing and pointing it out. Much more desirable than the anti-mac zealot moderation.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[jerw134]

Actually, it's called "Google is ignoring the robots.txt file that is in place". Please do some research before you post.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[jerw134]

How to look like a pedantic zealot in two little steps.

1. Pick out one tiny little piece of information that is almost inconsequential to the point of the post.

2. Look like an idiot because of step 1.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[ytpete]

I agree about that GP's misunderstanding of the "news reporting" part of the law. That being said, I think your other points contain some misunderstanding of the Fair Use Doctrine:

They are part of Google, a very commercial company. "No adds directly on the page" doesn't mean non-commerical.
Many posters are missing an important point here: just because something is commercial doesn't mean it can't quality for fair use. The law precedes this section by saying "the factors to be considered shall include." It's not an absolute requirement.

A picture is usually a copyrighted work in its own right, so it's 100% of the work there.
What's presented is merely a thumbail, which afaik is legally treated much like an excerpt.

The news-producers often make money by re-selling their reporting to other producers (ie, your local paper runs NY Times stories). ... That market is damaged if AFP stories are distributed free by Google.
You're ignoring the fact that Google reproduces only a portion of the work. By your logic, movie trailers damage the market for full motion pictures.

There are other damages also: for example, by reprinting the first paragraph, some portion of users will feel that's "enough" information and not feel the need to visit the real site.
Whether or not I convince someone that an article is worth reading has no bearing on whether I made fair use of the article by excerpting it. Excerpts in book reviews are a canonical example of fair use, even when they convince people not to go buy the book.

Overall, the balance may be that Google's usage is OK, but I'd be mildly surprised.
I'd be quite surprised if the result was a ruling against Google. Google News is not very much different legally from many other sites and blogs that aggregate news (including Slashdot). However, I'd also be mildly surprised if the result was a ruling in Google's favor. I'm betting they'll settle out of court like most cases these days.

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[TheoMurpse]

Jiminy Shnikies, why don't these guys just use a freakin' robots.txt in the root of their website?!?

Re:AFP will be the ones to lose

[joak]

Many posters are missing an important point here: just because something is commercial doesn't mean it can't quality for fair use. The law precedes this section by saying "the factors to be considered shall include." It's not an absolute requirement.

True. I was responding to the OP claim that Google News was non-commercial.

None of the points below, isolated, are enough to invalidate Google's fair use claim. I'm not even sure they are enough taken together. But it seems different from most analogies people are drawing here.

What's presented is merely a thumbail, which afaik is legally treated much like an excerpt.

If you are right, that obviously helps Google. Note that in the paper world however, a low-quality or smaller copy of an image is not treated as an "excerpt."

You're ignoring the fact that Google reproduces only a portion of the work. By your logic, movie trailers damage the market for full motion pictures.

The excerpt defense has no bearing on "market damage" impact assessment. Google News competes with other distributors who pay for content and try to sell their own papers by including an AFP article, photo, and headline; this market must be damaged if these are available elsewhere. The fact Google routes to the AFP site for the full article doesn't necessarily exonerate Google; AFP might prefer that readers get the article from the more lucrative redistribution market.

Whether or not I convince someone that an article is worth reading has no bearing on whether I made fair use of the article by excerpting it. Excerpts in book reviews are a canonical example of fair use, even when they convince people not to go buy the book.

This was a "significance of excerpt" point, not a "market damage" argument. The difference is important: Losing the original author a reader by convincing him the work is bad is fine. Copying so much that the original becomes irrelevant is not.

The more important difference: If you are a reviewer, you create a new work, and use a short excerpt to illustrate your own point made in your own words. (Note the same thing applies to blogs or Slashdot.) The reason this is the canonical fair use example is because it's an exercise of thought and speech, and protected by the first ammendment.

OTOH, Google is not creating a new work or adding new ideas to the marketplace. It's only copying verbatim the the most significant portion of the existing protected work. If I'm an AFP lawyer, that difference is significant. If I'm a judge? Not sure.

I'm betting they'll settle out of court like most cases these days.

Probably. Although, Google News' business model might prevent them from giving a penny to AFP, in which case they may want a clear court decision.

Security! Security!

[Faust7]

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.

If Agence France Presse didn't want people to view their content for free... ...why didn't they properly lock it down?

It's not like Google's impersonating a paid user account to get the information!

Re:Security! Security!

[ccady]

One word: Copyright. It doesn't matter that I let people see it: it's the right to make a copy that's being enforced here.

Re:Security! Security!

[no parity]

And I thought we'd left that "if it's on the internet, anyone can use it for any purpose" crap behind at least 5 years ago...

Re:Security! Security!

[Jeff DeMaagd]

That is very funny, that all they have to do is drop Googlebot requests. Instead they go to court!

Re:Security! Security!

[Keruo]

from AFP website:

Copyright:
©AFP 2005 . All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of contents from this website for personal and non-commercial use only, provided they do not remove any copyright, trademarks or other proprietary notices. Except as provided above, users may not reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP. AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.

I think that locks it down properly. Google just violated their copyright by reproducing and publishing their content without consent.

Re:Security! Security!

[Stonehand]

One, there are a bloody lot of them and it's not worth the time to go after any unless they're very high profile.

Two, the wire services are different from most news providers in that there business does not depend primarily on eyeballs driven to their site, but instead subscriptions from other news services to be allowed to redistribute their content -- the right that Google is partly appropriating for free. The NYT cares about end-user eyeballs, but Reuters, AFP, AP and UPI care about newspaper editors.

Three, in various countries such as the United States merely quoting small excerpts for the purposes of editorial commentary may be protected. It's treated a lot differently than providing excerpts with NO comment or other treatment. Mere aggregation, IIRC, is not protected.

Re:Security! Security!

[nukeindia.com]

Google just violated their copyright by reproducing and publishing their content without consent.

Google neither reproduced nor published their content. They simply put a link on their website pointing to the original content on the AFP site.

Re:Security! Security!

[timeOday]

Whoopdie-doo. Just because the AFP website makes some demands doesn't mean it's the law.

Re:Security! Security!

[The Cisco Kid]

But by permitting access to the site, they *ARE* provifing it for free. Unless you have to pay and/or log in to view the stories, they *ARE) free - if they arent free, then they should be behind a user/password prompt, at which point Google would no longer be able to access them or even be aware of them.

Re:Security! Security!

[someonewhois]

Yeah, 2 line robots.txt and they're done. Sounds a bit cheaper than going to court.

Re:Security! Security!

[yotto]

*Google just violated their copyright*

So, now the google bots must be programmed to read copyright notices on websites?

If they win on that, I'm going to put a cpyright notice on my site in esperanto and then sue google for 47 million dollars.

Re:Security! Security!

[InsaneGeek]

Linux is free but it has restrictions as to redistribution rights, etc. Microsoft cannot take the free linux kernel and incorporate that into their product while ignoring the GPL restrictions that were put on the free download.

Just because you put it up on a website without a password, doesn't mean that there are not restrictions on it's use.

Re:Security! Security!

[SEE]

Because they can't; AFP doesn't own (all) the servers Google is taking AFP content from.

AFP provides content to newspapers; the newspapers that buy the content are happy to allow Google to scrape content from their entire sites because that drives pageviews. The result is that AFP content licensed by newspapers winds up on Google News, even though AFP did not allow Google direct access to AFP content.

Re:Security! Security!

[TheGavster]

$17.5M is probably more than they would ever make directly from the free side of their news service. Presuming they win, its the more profitable manuver (Darl d'Bride, anyone?)

Re:Security! Security!

[LocoMan]

Most bloggers (that I've seen at least) usually add a little comment to the links and quotes, so it would qualify as editorial work which counts as fair use. AFAIK the main problem is that google just copies the text and photos and doesn't add anything, which I think would legally qualify as reproducing and distributing without permission.

Not that I agree with it, but at least that's how I understand it.

Re:Security! Security!

[drinkypoo]

1> Copyright notices are not contracts.
2> Even a contract does not trump fair use.
3> Simply by viewing a web page you are making a copy - a reproduction - of the images and other content on the page. Their desires are irrelevant because it is impossible to read their webpage without breaking their licensing terms.

Re:Security! Security!

[KiloByte]

Even experienced lawyers do have trouble reading copyright notices, EULAs and similar crap.

The established and official practice is to put the machine-readable "copyright" into robots.txt.

Re:Security! Security!

[Derg]

Beside that, something I always thought I noticed about google news is that they take the time to say where they got it from. Is it not true, that by giving credit to the owner of the idea/content/text, you are doing exactly what copyright requires? How does this differ from using a Bibliography to give credit to references in a paper?

it says...

Copyright:
©AFP 2005 . All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of contents from this website for personal and non-commercial use only, provided they do not remove any copyright, trademarks or other proprietary notices. Except as provided above, users may not reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP. AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.

Re:Security! Security!

[magefile]

I think it's a stupid lawsuit, but ... from your own quote:

Copyright: ©AFP 2005 . All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of contents from this website for personal and non-commercial use only, provided they do not remove any copyright, trademarks or other proprietary notices. Except as provided above, users may not reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP. AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.

Re:Security! Security!

[srleffler]

I disagree. If google puts a tag on its page which loads an image from AFP's publicly accessible server they have neither reproduced nor distributed the content. They have simply provided a reference to AFP's image, which the consumer's browser loads and displays in the middle of google's page. Google has done nothing but point to a location where the image can be found. It is the consumer who has actually downloaded the image from AFP. If AFP doesn't like this, they need to adjust their server not to provide images to people who aren't viewing an AFP page, or take other technical measures to prevent google from indexing news on their site.

Re:Security! Security!

[srleffler]

That isn't actually true. As the copyright owner, they are free to put their work in a place where the public can see it. They still have the right to deny people the right to copy it and do whatever they want with it. The lack of a technical measure to prevent you from doing something does NOT automatically mean that you have the right to do it, anymore than an unlocked door entitles you to enter and take whatever you want.

It's not clear to me, though that Google has actually done anything that infringes on AFP's copyright. It's not an infringement to make a reference to a copyrighted work, only to copy it.

Re:Security! Security!

[justin12345]

Technically, everytime you download something you copy it. Google caches the "entire" internet. So technically they (and everyone who are uses AFP's site) are making copies. AFP isn't sueing them for caching the site though; they are sueing them for the google news section. Technically the news section doesn't copy anything (except the headline). It just sends you to their site when you click a link. You could argue that the copyright extends to urls I suppose, but that would create liability anytime anyone links to anything (if the party being linked to does not consent).

I don't know if civil cases set a legal precedent or not; But if google loses this case in DC it would seem to be the end of the internet as we know it. It would allow you to sue anyone for linking to your site site without permission. So everytime someone says "X.com sucks!" they could get sued (more so then today).

Re:Security! Security!

[green menace]

Because they can't; AFP doesn't own (all) the servers Google is taking AFP content from. AFP provides content to newspapers; the newspapers that buy the content are happy to allow Google to scrape content from their entire sites because that drives pageviews.

Wouldn't that be an issue for AFP and the newspapers that they deal with to work out? If these newspapers are redistributing that content, they are the ones who AFP should be telling to adjust their policies on. There issues with Google should only be an issue concerning information taken from the actual AFP site. Either way, I think that AFP is SOL.

You can't get the whole story from news.google.com. You have to follow the link to the news site to get that. You can get the same info from searching for articles in any search engine. If google was using the full stories, this would have some merit. If google was using password protected content, this would have some merit.

The entire internet is a collection of links. I don't see how people can try to use a lawsuit to restrict what you can link to if the information is from a freely available source. If they don't want that information to be linked by bots, they should use a robots.txt to block the bots and stipulate that those who pay to use their FULL news stories must do the same. That would solve their problem without adding to the lawsuit frenzy that the world is in.


Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, I need some more. Gimme, Gimme, Gimme, Don't ask what for!

Re:Security! Security!

[Undefined Parameter]

Pardon me, but you appear to have highlighted the wrong part of the text. Allow me to first remove the highlighting on the applicaple sentence:

Except as provided above, users may not reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP.

Now, let us highlight another section of text:

Except as provided above, users may not reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP.

It's all in how the legalize is read, really.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

~UP

Re:Security! Security!

[justins]

I think that locks it down properly.

Then you don't know what you are talking about.

The above poster noted that they hadn't password protected the content. Worse than that, it is not even protected in the site's robots.txt. But the site does have a robots.txt. The implication is that anything not in the site is fair game.

But what the hell, it's the French.

Re:Security! Security!

[Farmer Jimbo]

I disagree. If google puts a tag on its page which loads an image from AFP's publicly accessible server they have neither reproduced nor distributed the content.

Sure they have. Google downloaded the image, resized it, and distibuted it from their server. Clearly copying and redistibuting.

The first sentence or two and the headline? That'll be tougher to convince a judge to enforce, though not impossible.

Re:Security! Security!

[LnxAddct]

That statemnet is not legally binding in the United States. For one, fairuse specifically cites news reports as able to be summarized, but also they should require all reders of the site to use a login and protect all of their content. If I wrote a bot to go around the web and find any likely new sources and index their stories, I sure as hell would have never been able to read the tens of thousands of copyright statements. People need to learn to start taking responsibility of thier own stuff on the net and stop being so damn litigious.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Security! Security!

[srleffler]

Technically, everytime you download something you copy it.

That's true, but not all copying is a violation of copyright. 'Fair use' provides some rights to copy materials for personal use. I suspect that when you view a page on the internet, the 'copying' that is necessary for you to view the page would fall under fair use. Of course, in most cases you also implicitly have the copyright owner's permission to make these temporary copies for purposes of viewing the content. I'm not a lawyer, but that might be the case even if the website has a claim that you need written permission to copy, since the copyright owner clearly intended for you to be able to view the content without requesting permission in writing first.

I agree with you about it being in principle the end of the internet. The courts have really not yet gotten their heads around the concept of linking as a reference to a work, rather than the work itself. There have been a number of cases where the courts found someone liable for linking to material that was hosted elsewhere.

Re:Security! Security!

[srleffler]

Google downloaded the image, resized it, and distibuted it from their server.

If that's actually what they do, then I agree with you. I assumed that they merely linked to the source website, rather than serving up a copy from their own server. If that's what they are doing, then the AFP has every right to the damages they will get from their lawsuit. That doesn't mean it isn't a stupid move on AFP's part, of course.

Re:Security! Security!

[Trick]

Tnat's not the case at all. Google's not getting their news directly from AFP; they're consolidating stuff published by people that buy stories from AFP.

Unless AFP starts requiring all of their customers to also start blocking Googlebot requests, it ain't gonna work.

Re:Security! Security!

[higuy48]

Well, if I'm not mistaken, as long as Google keeps Google News in beta (i.e. no income from Google News), that can qualify as non-commercial.

I think Google is going to skate through this regardless of the copyright status.

Re:Security! Security!

[ryanh50]

This may be a trite technical detail but it seems to me that they are not "reproducing" anything.
They simply link to the content and the site owners webservers are providing the content. It would seem to me that no reproduction or distribution has occured by anyone but the content owner.

Re:Security! Security!

[argStyopa]

This is silly. OK, please note the copyright below:

from AFP website:

Copyright:
©Styopa 2005 . All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of contents from this website for personal and non-commercial use only, provided they do not remove any copyright, trademarks or other proprietary notices. Except as provided above, users may not read, reproduce, publish, sell, distribute or in any way commercially exploit contents from this website without the prior written consent of AFP. AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.

There, did you read it? Well, now you're stuck.

The point being, you can CLAIM anything. Whether or not you are legally entitled to it is an entirely different matter.

Re:Security! Security!

[nahdude812]

Any page you place on the web, you're inherrently permitting the user to make a copy of. That's how the web works. Your server reads data off a disk, and sends a copy of that data to me.

It's equivalent to handing out fliers on the street corner, then suing someone else who gives away a copy of the same flier. There is a standard on how web pages operate, followed by apparently everyone except the AFP. And there are standard ways to designate exceptions to that operational model, followed by apparently everyone except the AFP. The failing is not with Google, and is the same as if they put a draconian copyright notice in swahili, then sued users who didn't understand the swahili.

If you do not want copies being distributed, there are known standard ways to do this: first, ensure that copies are only being given by you to those you wish to view it (password protected), and second, the very very standard robots.txt, where you can make it publically available but still deny spider access.

Re:Security! Security!

[lohphat]

A company's disclaimer does not negate the nature of the media it has elected to articipate in.

By placing unsecured content on the net it accepts the technical specs and scope of HTTP. A paragraph on its page is not a magic wand to privately redefine an RFC.

They chose to come to the game called the web, they need to play by the rules or get off the playing field.

Re:Security! Security!

[magefile]

I agree; technically, they didn't reprint AFP-site stuff, but stuff from sites that had the rights to AFP's stuff. But I think one could argue that even though it's beta, it benefits Google in a commercial way (by increasing traffic to Google, publicity, etc). Plus, I think R&D uses would still be covered.

Re:Security! Security!

[SEE]

It would make sense, from a technical point of view, for AFP to tell its customers to mark AFP content as not for Google to use.

From a buisness point of view, it makes more sense to try to extract money from Google than to tell your customers to do something that would cost them money. AFP is probably looking for a deal where Google doesn't change its behavior, but merely pays AFP a flat licensing fee for any AFP content that may show up on Google News.

Google wants to avoid that, because it would open the floodgates to anybody who licenses content to newspapers to demand a Google cut. So AFP is suing to try to push Google into accepting the deal.

Re:Security! Security!

[jerw134]

Apparently you missed the part where it says "Except as provided above", "above" being where it says that personal and non-commercial use is allowed.

Re:Security! Security!

[rsborg]

Yeah, 2 line robots.txt and they're done. Sounds a bit cheaper than going to court.

Yeah, except they did that, RTFA and all that.

From TFA:

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.

Re:Security! Security!

[eraserewind]

They would have to put it on all of the sites that they syndicate to, which is a far from trivial thing to arrange.

Google's public now. Lawyers smell blood.

[bigtallmofo]

Now that Google's a publicly traded company flush with cash, many potential litigants are smelling blood.

Google is both suing and being sued by so many parties now it's hard to keep track, as a search on Google will show.

One of the cases involving images.google.com appears to me to be more of a publicity stunt by the plaintiff.

I think we can expect more such lawsuits.

Damages?

[SteveXE]

What Damages? Google doesnt make a cent off Google news. All Google does is provide a blurb and a link, if the user is interested they click the link and go to the originating website. How is that possibly bad?

Re:Damages?

[rastakid]

What Damages? Google doesnt make a cent off Google news.

Hahahaha, nice troll, I'll bite. What about the Google ads? Do you think the companies advertised there get that service for free?

Re:Damages?

[PktLoss]

Google's income, or lack there of, is irrelevant. If you steal my car, and let all your friends drive it for free, but by doing so prevent me from going to work I can sue you for damages, my lost wages.

What is important is the preceived lost income by AFP, not Google's possible income by replicating the news.

A possible leverage point for litigation may be if AFP photos were being used beside a headline from another news source. In which case AFP may argue (and IMHO rightfully so) that their photography enticed the user to investigate the story, but they were not the recipiants of the revenue generating click.

Re:Damages?

[antifoidulus]

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.....

Re:Damages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is stealing anything, what is wrong with you simpletons?

Re:Damages?

[SteveXE]

There are no google ads on google news, try again.

Re:Damages?

[Predathar]

there are no adds on news.google.com, at least none that I see.

Re:Damages?

[deathazre]

wow. never mind the fact that news.google.com doesn't have any ads on it.

Re:Damages?

[SteveXE]

Google makes no money on Google news, there are no paid click throughs and no google ads, damn people get your facts straight.

Re:Damages?

[rastakid]

And do you all think that it will stay that way for ever? Remember Gmail's POP3 release? They said: "This service is free, for now.".

The problem is that too many Slashdotters don't see Google as a commercial company. Sure it's great that they take OpenSource seriously. Sure it's great that they are trying to outdo Microsoft. But they are still a company and they still want to make a profit.

If Google News comes out of beta it wouldn't surprise me if the page would include google ads.

Re:Damages?

[The Cisco Kid]

You analogy is invalid. Google isnt depriving the French news site of its stories.

A better analogy would be that you are an auto rental firm, and Google is telling people that ask that you have the cars they are interested in, and to contact you to rent cars from you. How could this possible be undesirable to you?

In essence they are getting free advertising from Google. Google should apoligize for not charging them, send them a bill, and stop returning hits/links to their news site until the bill is paid.

Re:Damages?

[cbr2702]

There are no ads on the "news" page.

Re:Damages?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Google News comes out of beta it wouldn't surprise me if the page would include google ads.

Quite possibly, yes. However, I'm not aware of many jurisdictions in the USA where it's possible to successfully sue someone for something they might possibly one day do. Normally, if you want damages, it's considered polite to wait for someone to damage you first, right?

Re:Damages?

[gardyloo]

damn people get your facts straight.

Zen Master says: "Patience. That's why we're all reading Slashdot."

Re:Damages?

[Eternally optimistic]

Yes they do, at least I hope so. By providing a large variety of good services, Google attracts users to all of their products. Without offering their free news service, a percentage of Google users would prefer different search enginges.

Re:Damages?

[SteveXE]

True they attract users to their other products but in no way does this hurt any news agency, if anything it helps by driving traffic to them. There are a couple sites I never heard of that I now visit almost daily after clicking on a google news link. If it wasnt for google they wouldnt have me as a visitor and potential customer.

Re:Damages?

[Eternally optimistic]

Yes I believe it is correct that the aggregate exposure works in favour of the news agency as well. I just don't think anyone is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, these are sound economic motives.

Re:Damages?

[Shinglor]

Google News is not beta anymore.

Re:Damages?

[antifoidulus]

um, look at the logo in the upper left and please read the word it says to the right of the lower case g. Thank you and please troll again.

AFP pictures on Yahoo! too

[netdur]

see it
one of two, Yahoo! took it legal or France hates google

Re:AFP pictures on Yahoo! too

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Yahoo! does have a contract with AFP. It pays to have that content there.

Re:AFP pictures on Yahoo! too

[pafrusurewa]

What do AFP's operations in the US have to do with France?

AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[no parity]

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.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[timeOday]

But google just has headlines and links. To read the story you have to go to an AFP authorized news site.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[The Cisco Kid]

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.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[Cletus the yokel]

"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.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[vanicat]

How is Google able to access the paid portions of AFP's site without paying?

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.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[Farmer Jimbo]

But to legaly display this content you have to pay AFP, even if other site are putting this content for free on the web.

If that's the crux of AFP's complaint, they're grasping I think. They may have a legitamate beef over using AFP photo thumbnails, but the headline and the first sentence or two? That's silly, even from a legal standpoint.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[PMuse]

This leads us to 3 options: . . .
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

AFP has "boots on the ground" to actually find out news, get facts, get quotes, verify events. They produce a real product in the real world and will continue to be valuable to their customers. The fundamentals of this situation are that AFP deserves to get paid for its efforts some how.

After all, if they didn't do this work, we'd know less.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[martin-boundary]

No it's not. The point is that Google are not doing fair use, because they pick a sentence on one site, another sentence on another site, and when you put all those sentences together, they have duplicated the full and complete AFP service.

Due to copyright, Google has to ask permission to copy from AFP, not from the websites which already paid AFP. And right now, Google isn't copying a small fair use chunk, they are copying 99% of AFP's material.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[martin-boundary]

You don't understand what AFP is, do you?

1) It's too difficult to ensure AFP headlines are filtered out. Google News is shut down or signigantly neutered.

The way out is for Google to do like all the other newspapers and magazines, buy a subscription that gives them the right to use AFP material.

2) AFP headlines are filtered out. AFP loses market share and relevance

AFP are the _source_ of news (together with Reuters etc.), whereas Google is a _consumer_ of news. AFP cannot lose market share to Google, that's ridiculous. That would be like saying that if AOL rebrands Internet Explorer it hurts Microsoft.

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.

That's stupid. If news sites avoid AFP, they've nothing to show other than Reuters. And you can bet that Reuters are just as interested in this as AFP, in fact they are probably waiting to spring their own lawsuit on Google. Most news sites don't discover news themselves, they buy it from AFP in the first place.

Re:AFP's prime business isn't their web site

[aussie_a]

but the headline and the first sentence or two? That's silly, even from a legal standpoint.

Why do you think they're suing in America? Because it's a silly complaint ;) If it had any merit they'd probably sue from France.

robots.txt

[n0dalus]

Google's indexes the web.
If you have a problem with that, put a robots.txt file on your site. Google even explains how to do that in it's own help pages.
This is all just a publicity stunt.

Re:robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

Legally speaking, there is absolutely no reason why I should have to put a robots.txt file on my site to keep my copyrighted information from being illegally duplicated by Google.

Or would you like to have to put a police.txt file on your door to prevent arbitrary search and seizure?

Re:robots.txt

[ebrandsberg]

Ah yes, but the news sites that post their articles don't blacklist. As it was pointed out, the AFP stories and photos. In addition, they don't restrict all directories, just some, and from what I can tell, those are honored.

The search engines need a blacklist

[ShatteredDream]

MSN, Yahoo and Google need to blacklist any company that sues them over something this stupid from ever being returned favorably in their results again. There is no reason that this French company's news should be returned now when any source from the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, etc. is availible on the same topic.

Re:The search engines need a blacklist

[Anonymous Coward]

If any search engine censors ANY results, instantly they become an unreliable search engine. As who knows what else they would censor.

Re:The search engines need a blacklist

[hazee]

Then they'd probably get sued for *not* including them...

Re:The search engines need a blacklist

[wkitchen]

Any bets on how long it would take AFP to sue to get relisted after their ratings plummet?

Re:The search engines need a blacklist

[Dhalka226]

Sounds better than "In response to some jackass trying to sue us for nothing, we have removed 2 result(s) from this page" though, don't you think?

Why would you attack Google?

[xiando]

Perhaps I am stupid or ignorant, but I still do not get why corporations figure it is bad for them to be promoted by Google and their services. It is not like Google shows the entire article, them linking sites and showing headlines has only one effect: People learn about the sites they show and click the links, meaning the news agency gets more visits and therefore more money. Isn't cutting off your major biggest referrer kind of shooting yourself in the foot?

Re:Why would you attack Google?

[roman_mir]

What is worse than biased moderators? Brainless moderators? At least a brainless moderator cannot be biased.

---

I think it is enough that AFP asked Google to remove links to their site from the Google News and were ignored.

"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."

Re:Why would you attack Google?

[aiyo]

One thing that google does that I dont agree with is stealing graphics from sites. They may pick up a pic from one news site but the most relavant link displayed for that story may be from another. Not all sites display graphics so google will borrow ones for sites that don't contain them.

Re:Why would you attack Google?

[roman_mir]

RTFM:

"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."

So Google was asked not to do this and they did it.

I think it is a fair reason to sue.

Re:Why would you attack Google?

[roman_mir]

yeah, I am sure they can figure out what came from the AFP site.

Re:Why would you attack Google?

[roman_mir]

actually it is not clear from TFA whether what you are saying is correct. It maybe and it may not be.

we need more details.

Re:Why would you attack Google?

[ashot]

I can think of 17 million reasons...

NOTE: News agency != News site

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note the difference between a "news agency" and a "news site"!

It's not trivial to filter out press reports from a news agency.

News agencies sell their raw-stories to news sites. Google can easily remove a news site from their news index, but excluding some articles from a news agency appearing on various news sites is difficult...

Re:NOTE: News agency != News site

[zotz]

"News agencies sell their raw-stories to news sites. Google can easily remove a news site from their news index, but excluding some articles from a news agency appearing on various news sites is difficult..."

So, the news agency should be suing the news site for not having robots.txt set up properly, not google. Yes? No?

But to short circuit the whole thing, how about the equivalent of robots.txt be developed for comment fields for all binary files and as a simple code to include in all text files?

Is this doable? Would it help?

all the best,

drew

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drthedeep end&PHPSESSID=895ce88a62b1eac346df2cd64a8a2a7b

Re:NOTE: News agency != News site

[martin-boundary]

It's not that difficult. All they need is to subscribe to AFP's service, parse all the sentences in all their current stories, and do a string match on displayed pages for those sentences. Then they remove those pages that match sufficiently well.

In fact, because the same AFP stories appear on lots of web sites, Google wouldn't need to subscribe to AFP to find them, a statistical analysis should be able to point out substantially identical web content which would be a good candidate for being a news agency story. Moreover, such stories are often marked with an explicit copyright in both teh text, and the photos. So it's not hard to make a good effort to hide AFP's stories from users.

On the other hand, all Google has to do is buy a monthly subscription license from AFP and they don't need to do any coding at all to stay on the correct side of the law.

Re:NOTE: News agency != News site

[zotz]

You know, perhaps apache and the orther well intentioned web server authors can fix this with a TOS.

N. You may not use this software to publish copyrighted articles which should not be indexed, summarised, and the results displayed publicly unless you indicate this via proper use of a robots.txt file on the server which you use to publish the material.

Could that help? Or would this make the software non-Free and start us down a path we do not want to go down.

all the best,

drew

IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators

[EggyToast]

have numerous laws set up to explicitly avoid such situations?

Maybe I've been misled, but when a news agency publishes a story, that story can be used and published by others as long as the source is cited. Google cites all of their sources, links to the original source, and essentially are providing pre-search engine usefulness. They're collecting news that people are interested in or has general appeal and displaying it like they would a search, and there's already numerous laws that state it doesn't violate copyright to index information like that.

More importantly, if this lawsuit goes to court, EVERY online news aggregator would be forced to stop, and it would likely have repercussions for all major news agencies. CNN's stories are only about 1/3 CNN's -- the rest are pulled from other sources, AFAIK. How many times have you read a story somewhere and it says at the top "REUTERS" or "AP WIRE" ?

Ultimately it wouldn't surprise me if Google has this case dismissed under the grounds that Google is not providing the news, rather is simply providing an index of different news sources.

Re:IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators

[Stonehand]

CNN and your local newspaper most likely subscribe to the wire services and have a deal that permits redistribution.

If Google does not, then by providing excerpts for a non-editorial, non-educational, and rather commercial purpose they may be unfairly infringing.

Re:IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators

[EggyToast]

As stated above, there are no ads on google news, so Google is running the service at a loss. How much of a loss is unknown, but as it is, Google News is essentially "google" for news. That may sound obvious, but if this suit sees the actual courtroom, how is the news service different from Google's regular searches?

Re:IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators

[mellonhead]

I thought companies like CNN paid Reuters and AP to use their content.

Re:IANAL, but don't news agencies and aggregators

[AaronGTurner]

Whether or not a profit or loss is made on a particular service is irrelevant. If I go and photocopy a book without permission and hand photocopies out to people in the street, at my expense, I would still potentially be violating copyright laws.

However, if I take a news report and create a precis of it and photocopy it and hand it out to people in the street, I am in the clear as I am using my personal knowledge after reading the article, to create a new article.

There are text tools begining to come into existence which will precis documents. A tool of this sort would allow Google to take news feeds and produce their own rewritten digest of these, with possibly no copyright implications, unless there is further legal precedent set or if organisations can place additional restrictions on documents via some sort of licensing agreement (Creative Commons licences can place restrictions on the recipient or user over and above standard copyright restrictions).

Re:Don't go there!

[sboss]

but when did they put that up? they probably put it up after the lawsuit started or literally imediately prior.

Sigh...

[kclittle]

Another example of the growing and insidious meme "since digitial information is so easy to steal, it must be OK to do so".

Uh, it's not.

Re:Sigh...

[The Cisco Kid]

Steal? What steal? They are helping to direct visitors to the french news site. Presumably, the site wants visitors (if it doesnt, why does it exist?)

People scheme and scheme of ways to get their site into results returned by Google. It boggles the imagination why anyone would sue for getting for free what so many are willing to go to great lengths to get.

Re:Sigh...

[drinkypoo]

Another example of the growing and insidious meme "since the RIAA and MPAA say that copyright infringement is theft, it must be correct."

Re:Sigh...

[jesdynf]

Another example of the growing and insidious meme "since digitial information is so easy to steal, it must be OK to do so".

Rather try, "Because digital information is so easy to /infringe/ -- it is of course neither theft nor piracy, and if we're going to make up words I'm going to call it copyright jaywalking -- perhaps the laws surrounding it need to be reexamined."

Re:Sigh...

[kclittle]

(double sigh!)

OK, I'll concede the technicality of "steal" vs. "infringe", even though any 10 year-old who's spent any time attending his/her church/synagogue/temple/mosque would instantly call you on the weak, hair-spliting semantic dodge.

Another example of the growing and insidious meme "since digitial information rights are so easy to infringe (plagiarize, pirate, trespass upon...), it must be OK to do so".

Uh, it's *still* not.

How is this different from /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have there been any cases where someone has been able to keep one site from linking to another? I seem to remember someone suing on that basis but I don't remember hearing the verdict.

Re:How is this different from /.?

[DeepHurtn!]

The difference is that /. doesn't actually *reproduce* any content -- it just links to it. If /. mirrored and hosted pages linked to on the front page itself, as is sometimes suggested, it probably would get in trouble.

Re:Don't go there!

[xiando]

Looking at http://www.afp.com/robots.txt which looks like:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /beta
Disallow: /francais/news
Disallow: /english/news

I find it very strange that they do not disallow the entire site if they mind Googles robot finding and showing their news... I would understand them being upset if Google ignored or disrespected their robots file, but it does look very much like they are suing them for doing something they allow?

Re:Don't go there!

[LurkerXXX]

If you read the robots.txt file, you'll see they block english/news, but the headlines, and part of the story leads (which the news agency is sueing them for displaying) are presented on their main page, above the english/news subdirectories. They didn't disallow search engines to crawl that main page in the robots.txt file, therefore it is fair game. The images might be questionable, but most of the suit looks like garbage.

Re:Don't go there!

[HyperChicken]

Time to go back. How far back? Wayback. http://web.archive.org/web/20010418183951/http://w ww.afp.com/robots.txt

Napoleonic Code

[putko]

Continental Europe has a legal code derived from the Napoleonic code.

It is particularly irrational and inflexible, and nowhere near as abstract as English Common Law.

E.g. people in Continental Europe need to carry ID papers with them when in public. Cops can stop you and interrogate you -- because. The law says you are free, but you better carry ID. And watch your mouth (you might break the law).

Thanks Napoleon!

So it is entirely "reasonable", to the mind of a Continental European, that a respectable media company like AFP can sue to stop some upstart from doing something novel and innovative, just because technology allows it -- the law is inherently pro-status quo.

In Germany, a British retailer dared to have a sale. This was deemed illegal -- the state argued (on behalf of the German retailers) that the temporary nature of the sale would COMPEL Germans to buy more stuff. Really it was just that German retailers can't compete with Anglo-retailer Kung Fu, and the state was happy to do their bidding, with the result that the German consumer lost out.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[rimmon]

OK, will the morons who voted this interesting please stand up so we can all have good laugh?
Or maybe you're right: It is kind of interesting what bullshit some people either make up or really believe.
Anyway, parent is a total moron...

Re:Napoleonic Code

[PTBarnum]

Given that the suit was filed in a US district court, I'm not sure why you think Napoleonic law is relevant.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[Guppy06]

"Continental Europe has a legal code derived from the Napoleonic code."

So do parts of North America, what's your point? On this side of the pond, it's not the national government that sets the standard for who's flavor of common law a state or province uses.

And while we're on the subject, the Napoleonic Code (nor English Common Law) have any sway on constitutional, criminal or civil law in any meaningful way. That level of law gets trumped by anything, especially laws passed by the legislature, and is only referenced in cases where neither the legislature or even the courts have yet to rule one way or another in a particular matter.

"E.g. people in Continental Europe need to carry ID papers with them when in public. Cops can stop you and interrogate you -- because. The law says you are free, but you better carry ID. And watch your mouth (you might break the law)."

Yes, that's why Louisiana and Quebec are such police states...

The behavior of the police has next to nothing to do with Napoleonic Code/Common Law and has everything to do with constitutional and criminal law.

"doing something novel and innovative,"

You work for Microsoft, don't you?

"the state argued (on behalf of the German retailers) that the temporary nature of the sale would COMPEL Germans to buy more stuff."

Nice links you got there. Since Germany is something of a federal republic, can you at least name the state this supposed suit took place in?

Re:Napoleonic Code

[Pig Hogger]

Continental Europe has a legal code derived from the Napoleonic code.
It is particularly irrational and inflexible, and nowhere near as abstract as English Common Law. What a bunch of stupid oxdung. Only the most stupid anglo-saxon troll would react like so.
Britshit common law is the best example of a primitive law code where the most powerful entity (the one with the best lawyers) wins.
Civil code, on the other hand is neatly clear-cut. You always know where you stand, and the final outcome is solely derived from the facts, and not some obscure jurisprudence that was often obtained because some poorer party could not afford to appeal some inane decision, making the inane decision become law.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[MPolo]

Germany traditionally allowed two sales a year -- a winter clearance and a summer clearance. It was illegal to discount at other times. The retailer C&A attempted an "always 10% off" policy a while back, and they were stopped. Price dumping is explicitly illegal, which has hindered Wal-Mart's uptake in Germany. It's not the specific case mentioned, but this link shows the general mentality of the time -- one store sued another because it was offering a 10% Easter rebate by reducing the price at the cash register rather than putting up new price signs in the store. In this case, the plaintiff lost, however.

However, the "sale policy" changed this year. Stores may now have sales when they want to, though price-dumping remains illegal. (On the news, many Germans were convinced that this was the beginning of the end, that there would never be a summer clearance sale again...)

Re:Napoleonic Code

[BeeRockxs]

E.g. people in Continental Europe need to carry ID papers with them when in public.
Wrong, at least in Germany.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[putko]

Napoleonic code doesn't obtain here. But it explains why the French think and act the way they do.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[putko]

Germans do need to carry ID. Here's a nice site in German (auto translation explaining that if you are over 16, you need to carry.

If cops ask, you must present it. The ID is the property of the state! And you need to register where you live with the police.

Simply put, you are incorrect.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[putko]

Napoleonic code is more autocratic than Common Law. The basic idea of Civil Law (Napoleonic) is that the state is the source of all rights (Rousseau's theory). Common Law, oppositely, holds that individuals have rights, and they choose to give up some to the state, for certain limited purposes.

Lousiana's laws and Quebec's are mitigated by the fact that they are not supreme (e.g. US/Canada with Common Law are in the picture) -- the decline of States Rights implies that more and more for Louisiana.

AFP, being used to those rules, is used to using the courts to shut down insolent upstarts like Yahoo! and Google.

Here's an English language link for you on the German department store tempest in a teapot

Here are quotes:

The German Retail Association, which sided with the court in the case, said short-term sales were unjustified because temporary changes in prices confuse consumers and are unfair because they force shoppers to interrupt their schedules and rush to stores to take advantage of price cuts.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[putko]

I lived in those places for many years. I know what I'm talking about.

The fact that the cops didn't require you to produce ID is imamterial -- they had the right to, and you would have been required to. That's what the law says.

Check this out: Original in german translated

The card is the property of the state.
You must carry it.
You must present it if asked.
A foreigner is subject to similar requirements. It happened to my boss. They detained him on the street for an hour to check his passport.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[Guppy06]

First off, I am not a lawyer, but I pretended to be a politician in a former life.

"The basic idea of Civil Law (Napoleonic) is that the state is the source of all rights (Rousseau's theory)."

Napoleonic Code != constitution. Constitutions are the documents that decide where rights come from.

"Lousiana's laws and Quebec's are mitigated by the fact that they are not supreme"

Oh, for crying out... it's not supreme anywhere! Constitutions are supreme! Most of them even say so, flat-out in the documents themselves! Common law schemes are nothing more than a legal afterthought, a series of "Oh, by the way..." rules generally agreed upon unless something better and/or more specific (like, say, a freakin' statute!) comes along.

"US/Canada with Common Law are in the picture"

Not only do you not seem to have any grasp of the concept of common law schemes, you don't seem to have a grasp of the US Constitution itself. You will not find the phrase "common law" anywhere in the document. We live in a federal republic and it is up to the states to decide what schemes to set up and for the national government to respect their decisions and follow their lead, and it's the state constitutions and state statutes where you'll find mention of whether English Common Law or, in the case of Louisiana, the Napoleonic Code is used. I would assume the nature of the Canadian confederation is similar.

"the decline of States Rights implies that more and more for Louisiana."

Wait... you just used the phrase "states' rights" with a straight face after spouting the previous "Washington uber alles" bit? I think I need to lie down now...

Not that any of this really touches on the situation in Quebec, where arguably they are more at liberty than your typical US state is to govern itself without outside interference.

"AFP, being used to those rules, is used to using the courts to shut down insolent upstarts like Yahoo! and Google."

Courts make rulings on statutes! They don't say whether or not someone "violated X part of common law" (and not just because the entire concept of "violating" common law is absurd!), they decide on whether or not someone violated a law duly proposed, voted on, and enacted by the democraticly-elected legislature. Common law schemes only come into play to answer certain vague questions like "Was this really trespassing?" or "Is this really a contract?"

"Here are quotes:"

Here's my own quote, from the article you provided:

"Germans are watching the case closely to see if the standoff between C&A and a Düsseldorf district court yields any precedents that could weaken half-century-old laws...

We're not talking about Napoleonic Code here, we're talking about a German statute (unless, of course, your feared Napoleonic Code doens't date to before 1950, even though it's named after Napoleon). Your little francophobe rant has nothing to do with anything here. If you want to rant against the French, do us a favor and try to avoid the half-cocked conspiracy theories to base your "arguments" upon. You're giving us true political crackpots a bad name.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[putko]

A constitution says where the laws come from. It does not decide, but rather describes. Otherwise the constitution would not be well-founded.

The French one (see article 34) says that rights come from statue. The American says the rights belong to the people. Our tradition says the rights come from natural law (God), not statue.

In France, it is more simple -- rights come from statute, only. The French state doesn't get them from anywhere, so the state is supreme.

That's far more autocratic.

My point about States Rights is that since the end of the Civil War, the federal government has increasingly intruded on matters that were previously decided by states. Hence, state law matters less and less -- you can't see the effects of Lousiana law as clearly as you could before.

here is an example, from Quebec: a slip of the pen by Quebec lawmakers and your only hope is relief from the feds. If that happened in California, you'd argue that your rights were being taken away, by the state -- no limited for some good purpose, but removed. If the court agrees you're home free.

So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty. In the US, people consider it their God-given right to associate as they wish, speak their mind and so on. If the government chose to take it away (constitutional amendment), many would argue that that was illegal according to natural law. This would be "extra-judicial", but entirely in keeping with the spirit of Anlgo American law. You can't make that argument if you believe in Civil Law -- if the government takes it away, then that's the law.

So people from civil code countries have a more compliant mentality. When the Germans took away the right for a merchant to cut his prices, people accepted it. Here, people would talk about freedom of contract (which the state may limit, with good reason -- but the right still exists). The mere fact that you can argue about whether the law is legal or not means that Americans are a lot less compliant.

There is no conspiracy theory here, merely an attempt to explain the attitudes that inform the French actions.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[Guppy06]

"In France, it is more simple -- rights come from statute, only."

Unless you ignore the whole Declarations of the Rights of Man thing. The French go through constitutions every two weeks or so, and it's easier for them to just attach that particular piece of boilerplate instead of cut-and-paste all the time. It's only mentioned in the very first sentence of the (current) French Constitution, after all...

"you can't see the effects of Lousiana law as clearly as you could before."

Many people praticing law in Louisiana, who are painfully aware of living on "a civil law island in a common law sea" may disagree with you.

"So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty."

Yeah, those godless commies!

They have no concept of "the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man," there isn't anything in French law stating that "the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights," there aren't any checks on the legislature, such as something saying "law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society," and there certainly isn't anything in French constitutional law saying that property is an "inalienable" right, let alone "sacred!"

Oh, wait...

"If the government chose to take it away (constitutional amendment), many would argue that that was illegal according to natural law."

Alternatively, there are no similar invokations of the Declaration of Indepence codified in the United States Constitution. The US Constitution only points to itself as the "supreme law of the land" and constitutional amendments can be ratified that violate the spirit or even the letter of the Declaration of Independence, and the only way to fix it would be another amendment repealing it, or 3/4 of the state legislatures getting together and writing a new federal constitution entirely.

I mean, have you seen the Eighteenth Amendment?

(I just ranted in defense of the French... I feel so dirty...)

Re:Napoleonic Code

[BeeRockxs]

I live in Germany. And yes, if the cops ask, you must present it, but you may go home to get it.
And you don't need to register where you live with the police, but with the city government.
Simply put, you are incorrect.

Re:Napoleonic Code

[putko]

...rights from statute only ...

Unless you ignore the whole Declarations of the Rights of Man thing. The French go through constitutions every two weeks or so, and it's easier for them to just attach that particular piece of boilerplate instead of cut-and-paste all the time. It's only mentioned in the very first sentence of the (current) French Constitution, after all...

I was referring to the source of the rights (not whether or not the are inalienable or not). Please go back and read the French Constitution and the TDoRoM again, carefully. You'll see that although the rights are incorporated, the current constitution (article 34, as I mentioned), says they come from statute. TDoRoM lists some rights, but does't say the rights come from God. It just says they exist, and mentions God in passing.

Even if TDoRoM did say the rights come from God (which it doesn't), that would make Article 34 of the constitution nonsensical. You have to figure that the people who signed off on #34 wanted it that way.

..."So Civil Code countries don't have the concept of divine-enshrined or individual liberty."...

Yeah, those godless commies!

The divine-enshrined nature of things merely ensures that the rights can't be taken away by statute. That's my point, not how religious or communist the French (or Continental Europeans in general) are. The secular nature of the French constitution allows them to take away rights many different way. E.g. a statue could make French rites contingent on whatever the UN declared them to be. Such is impossible in the US.

Alternatively, there are no similar invokations of the Declaration of Indepence codified in the United States Constitution. The US Constitution only points to itself as the "supreme law of the land" and constitutional amendments can be ratified that violate the spirit or even the letter of the Declaration of Independence, and the only way to fix it would be another amendment repealing it, or 3/4 of the state legislatures getting together and writing a new federal constitution entirely.

Indeed the Declaration of Independence is not part of the Constitution. That's not so important when it is clear where the rights come from, and people believe that they have the rights no matter what the government says. The people Continental Europe have the mindset that this week they have certain rights, and depending on what the EU or their government says next week, they have different rights. E.g. one week a political party is legal, the next week its banned. So this week you've got your TDoRoM rights, but maybe not next week.

Also, the TDoRoM doesn't even include the right to life. That omission was on purpose; they clearly knew about our Declaration of Independence. But anyway, it doesn't really matter; TDoRoM is a relic of the early part of the French Revolution. Those guys lost in the end to Napoleon, who got rid of the rights in his 1799 constitution. So apparently those rights are not so inalienable after all (and apparently, for the French, the right to life was never in there anyway, so who cares).

The fact that Napoleon took away the rights of TDoRoM makes me think that Article 34 really is correct -- the rights come from statute, not some power outside the control of government.

I mean, have you seen the Eighteenth Amendment?

Yes, I have.

I'd say though, that at least back then, people understood that there needed to be an amendment to take away alcohol, and an amendment to tax income.

These days, in contrast, people accept the government banning/taking things under the commerce clause, or propose taxing things or otherwise regulating things out of existence. E.g. a $10 tax per bullet, whose effect would be to destroy the 2nd Amendment.

(I just ranted in defense of the French... I feel so dirty...)

I am not anti-French per se. E.g. the Germans have a similarly unfree system.

Re:Sick and tired of these law suits

[KarmaMB84]

and show that Google thinks they have monopoly power and are ready and willing to abuse it?

Fuck that noise.

[zecg]

Putting aside whether AFP has the right to control who aggregates their content, where and how it is displayed, this is just idiocy.
It's just another chapter in the constant war between the forces who would lock content down, draw users to their sites and than burn down all semantic bridges, against the very nature of the Internet. Connectedness, restructuring and copying information is here to stay. We can cry about companies who are losing money because they are selling information, but that does not mean that anyone can help them at this point. Their current business models are almost dead at this point.

But it ignores the obvious

[tkrotchko]

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.

Re:But it ignores the obvious

[cbr2702]

But we're talking about a news agency, not a website. They provide content to large numbers of companies that publish newspapers and sites. But they retain copyright.

Re:But it ignores the obvious

[mikael]

But we're talking about a news agency, not a website. They provide content to large numbers of companies that publish newspapers and sites. But they retain copyright.


Then they can password protect the content, and maintain a subscription service. If they don't want the hassle of charging money for the information, they can arrange a reciprocal cross-licensing scheme with other news agencies.

Re:But it ignores the obvious

[cbr2702]

They are a company like Reuters or the AP. They make their business by selling news articles to newspapers. These newspapers put the articles into their print newspapers and up on their websites. Then Google News comes along, makes a summary and maybe takes thumbnail, and then distributes these on their website with links back to the newspaper's website. So Google is using the copyrighted content of the news agency and the agency gets nothing. The agency also has no technological control over what the newspapers do with their content; they rely on copyright law to protect them.

So password protecting the content is out, as they are selling it for redistribution. And they already maintain a subscription service and charge money, its just that the people who they sell to are not end-readers but newspapers.

Re:But it ignores the obvious

[Jim Starx]

Selling it for redistrobution would make password protection the best solution. Just sell a password.

Re:But it ignores the obvious

[RealityThreek]

No, what we are talking about is a news agency with a website. Google news doesn't go to their desks and steal their stories. This is no different than any other website. If they don't like how that works, they need to limit access to their server.

Case will already be over.

[DarkMantle]

There was a similar case shortly after the birth of the www. Site "A" sued Site "B" for quoting part of thier website and linking to it if readers wanted to read more. Imagine the horror, one site linking to another.

Anyway, the court decided it was not Copyright infringement because the original source was provided and given full credit, and some other factors.

Nothing to see here

You're right, but...

[Faust7]

I concede the legal point about copyright, which is what the whole lawsuit is about. That part of it is pretty cut-and-dried. However, that's not my main concern. One of the points the the article (though not necessarily AFP itself) seems to make is that AFP wants its content to only be able to paying customers. Unless that content is locked down on a technical level, this objective is dead. Several companies, amazingly, still have not realized just how easy the Internet has made the dissemination of information. Heck, even with paid user accounts, it's all too easy for someone to copy, paste, and reproduce, either privately or commercially. Obviously the ease does not justify the act from a legal standpoint, but it nevertheless presents a logistical reality that companies need to take into account when making any sort of information available online.

the GTFO option

[justins]

Why is google still doing business in France anyway? With the recent lawsuits the most reasonable option seems to be to blacklist the entire country. Let them use msn and suffer.

Re:the GTFO option

[cgrand]

Let Linus go back to Finland and change the Linux license to forbid US citizens to use it because SCO is a US company.

I wonder

[roman_mir]

Have they tried applying a robots.txt file properly first? Wouldn't it be cheaper?

http://www.google.com/lawyers.txt

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /lawsuit

AFP = plaguerisism of AP and REUTERS

[Anonymous Coward]

Significantly, any major story released by the AFP is essentially an OP/ED peice based on a previously released story by either the Associated Press and Reuters. Why haven't either AP or Reuters attempted to fight google for displaying thier images? And why would the AFP mind getting more attention by getting some free advertising? The photos are labeled AFP!

Sounds like a frivilous attempt to get-rich-quick on Google's amazing success which has now reached global recognition, as demonstrated by the AFP's sad endeavor to gain financially over something so unimportant.

The importance of non-commerciality

[cbr2702]

Whether Google is making money off Google News is likely to be completely relevant. Google will probably try to claim "fair use" is the images and text, and the bounds on non-commercial fair-use are weaker. This is why Google has always kept ads off the news page.

Re:Don't go there!

[AaronGTurner]

They may wish google to index the site so google searches can be aware of the existence of the site, but do not wish to have their actual copyrighted content searchable for some reason. I would think that it would be better for them to have the entire site indexed for search purposes, but just disagree with google using the content verbatim.

Re:Don't go there!

[Richard_at_work]

A Robot trawling the site and a news aggregator specifically reusing headlines, content and images from the site are two completely different things. Just because AFP doesnt disallow the googlebot from trawling doesnt mean they give up the copyright to the content.

Reality check

[mattr]

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.

Re:Reality check

[Xyrus]

"and show large, high quality photos on their site."

Speaking of reality checks, I think you need one. Google news is popular because even for people with low bandwidth it comes up quickly. You cover that page with hi quality images and you'll lose a good portion of your audience because it takes "forever" to load.

What Google displays are low-quality replicas of images. I highly doubt any reasonable judge would say they're breaking copyright.

For AFP, it will be a lose lose situation. If they win, Google will blacklist them and AFP will lose a major source of those precious button clicks. If they lose...well they lose.

Don't bite the hand that feeds you, especially when it is the #1 MOST POPULAR SEARCH ENGINE ON THE PLANET.

~X~

Re:Reality check

[RealityThreek]

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.

Have you actually gone to news.google.com? I'm not meaning to sound rude when I ask, but each image includes a reference to the article the image came from underneath. You can click the link and go directly to the source of the image.

I disagree with your premise that Google is in the wrong here. What they are doing is the same as they have done for millions of other websites. They are indexing and providing a brief preview. If you disagree with them in this case, you are effectively saying that Google's business model is illegal everywhere.

Re:Reality check

[SlashdotMeNow]

From TFA:

"In 2002, a federal appeals court ruled that Web sites may reproduce and post "thumbnail" or down-sized versions of copyrighted photographs. "

I don't think AFP has a case here.

Re:Reality check

[martin-boundary]

I don't get it. All Google have to do is buy a subscription license like all the other newspapers and magazines, and they don't have to worry about displaying potentially infringing material to web searchers. It's trivial, and certainly not the end of the web.

On the other hand, if Google don't buy a license, then my guess is they are in trouble, because the DMCA has exceptions for them as long as they act promptly in removing copyright infringement from their index. Does anyone remember when CoS told Google to remove copyrighted material? Google complied or they would have lost common carrier status and been open to full copyright infringement suits. Now AFP have told them to remove their material. Under the DMCA, Google must comply, otherwise they are liable.

The whole thing is stupid, Google should just buy a subscription. It's not like they can't afford it.

Re:Reality check

[mattr]

You are correct in that big images would slow down the page.. unless Google knows your bandwidth of course.

However AFP has nothing to lose. They do not make money on button clicks. They are already known as some of the highest quality / penetration provider in the world.

I think you are missing one point. A small image is not a "replica", which has no meaning digitally. It is a low-res copy. It think they should be allowed, and they are required for visual-type search engines. However the main argument against this by photo agencies (and believe me I spent years trying to convince a big one to go digital) is that even tiny sized images are sold. For example a travel magazine I know (ABRoad) usees 1cm sized images - but tons of them. It is the minimum useable size which is why google uses them. They are not "replicas" which are not useful.

As for blacklisting, that is exactly 1) what AFP wants, in terms of unpaid useage, and 2) probably illegal and not what AFP wants, in terms of no longer letting people find the AFP website. However given a choice they would prefer blacklisting.

Anyway, Google is not the hand that feeds AFP. It is most likely the hand that chokes AFP in the future.

Re:Reality check

[mattr]

Hi!
Thanks for the response. Of course I went to news.google.com for my example of the Boston Globe story however it is not my main news source. I don't know if it is intentional or not, but the link I chose went to a page with a story that did not have the photo on it. If in the case of a highly ranked story not having a photo it seemed to me (could be wrong of course) that Google was selecting a photo from another indexed publication, and putting it there with a link to the highest index story. That is walking a very fine line between search engine and publication, but I agree it should still be allowed.

Anyway, my premise is that Google is not wrong (although that word has a lot of interpretations depending where and when in the world you are), and should not be punished. Also I think Google's business model is legal. However, it is also true that photo agencies must pay for creation of images, and also are extremely strict about how they can be used - sizes, venues, circulation - and the more a photo is used the less other customers might want to use it. For example they probably cannot now make a contract with another search engine company to use their photos for pay. As for legality IANAL and it is probably illegal somewhere but that municipality is also behind the times.. it ought to be allowed.

I am just providing the most liberal take on this based on my experience as advocate FOR digitization and searching for the Japanese photo industry (until about 8 years ago). They turned down working with a massive database firm that wanted to eat them alive and regularly pursue unannounced usage of photos. So the bottom line is as you say, "indexing and brief preview" should be allowed (and if it is not somewhere, the law should be changed). However, if the search engine ends up creating say a custom newspaper for you with that photo size, it should not be allowed. Google's position is that the image size shown is equivalent to just showing the first few lines of a story (which they do), however because it is not directly equivalent (you can still use a photo that size), there is a gray area allowing AFP's interpretation in some cases / jurisdictions possibly. There are many photographers / artists who in fact are very uncomfortable with resized (bigger than chicklet size in fact) versions of their images being shown in google images search too. In the end I think the best thing for the world is to allow whatever Google wants to do (to the extent they have done so far) in the Images and News sections, but if a photo owner like AFP or an individual photographer strongly protests they should be able to demand and enforce NOT being displayed in a visual search by use of metadata. For example photographers and artists are likely to be quite vocal about the best size to show a work of theirs. This ignores some (not all) facets of modern digital display technology but it is not an issue that can be glibly tossed into the air. So a legal precedent for the legality of tiny images for fair use would be useful. I agree with Google but also note they have made conscious decisions on how far to push it and they are just short of the line. AFP is going for their last gasp but probably will lose since they are I believe morally wrong (but haven't seen the facts of the case).

How would you feel if you knew that over half of all photos are from AFP in fact? (Devil's Advocate)

Thanks,

Matt

Re:Reality check

[mattr]

Thanks. If TFA is right and applicable to the entire case then that sounds like you are also correct.

It might be different if for example Google was trawling an AFP database, proven by server logs, and digesting AFP-created XML files which link photos to Reuters stories, and then if Google intentionally selected AFP-provided photos for their known high quality, and matched them to highly ranked stories that did not have photos of their own. The worst case would be a little worse, in which Google does all this and also compounds the insult by hyperlinking the photo to a publication that does not even subscribe to AFP feeds.

I don't think Google is that dumb. So I think you are right. The end result is that probably a lot of AFP photos are used, so there is I would imaging a 10% chance that some judge somewhere will award AFP something but it seems like Google is being both honest and firm as to their right to use a preview. Looking forward to seeing Google win.

Re:Reality check

[mattr]

Hi,
Thanks for your response.
IANAL but your interpretation could be correct in some instances.
To me it seems that if you require a search engine (especially a free service like news.google.com that does not show full stories) operator to worry about this sort of thing they will never get off the ground. Chicklet-size images should be free to use for search purposes. But if the image is linked I think it should go to a page identifying the image owner's credit line and a full size version of the image or page that has it. Hopefully Google doesn't have to worry about this.

Incidentally it is not clear to me that there is a subscription Google could buy that would solve this problem. In fact if you look at afp.com you will see that Agence France-Press in fact is running a service that looks much like Google News, showing stories and photos. Some photos on the top page are the same size as what Google is using. So AFP protests their competitor being able to use their products to compete with them, however since it seems the two competing services are both free it seems moot. But it is questionable how big a photo can get and still be allowed. Would say a 4x6 cm image on your desktop (eminently "useable" I think) be free? If for search purposes (to lead people to the place where the photo and story is) I think it should be allowed.

Wondering that myself.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Seems like i hear a lot of some French company is suing for this, or the French have banned this, or the French have made a stink over this or that. There is more of Europe right? Or are they asleep? Or (dare i say it) has the rest of Europe managed to not have a huge chip on thier shoulder? i'm not slamming France, just damn, everytime i turn around, they're raising hell about something.

Re:Wondering that myself.

[lguldur]

Bien sur, tu devrais savoir ca : Les français râlent sans arrêt, ne se lavent pas et bouffent de drôles de trucs.

Yeah, you should be aware of that : French people are always complaining for nothing, are dirty and eat strange things.

Do you know what an histrion is for ?

--
fait chier

The beginning of end of news agencies?

[say]

Maybe this isn't a simple issue of publicity or drawing easy cash from Google, but a last attempt to win a juridical last resort against the inevitable death of news agencies?

As the web continues it's march towards becoming the primary news source, and remains free-and-open, news agencies will suffer. Recently, Norway's second largest newspaper Dagbladet opted out of a new contract with the national news agency NTB. Although they did make a deal with ANB, a smaller and cheaper agency, the ratio of articles directly from the agencies seem to fall quite quickly.

And it makes sense. Why pay a lot for content you can receive for free? Journalism in the information world is cheap, because you don't need to travel much to get a good overview. Blogs and online newspapers are much cheaper to make and distribute than paper papers (heh). As journalism and distribution becomes cheaper, the need for agencies diminishes.

So a last resort for the agencies could be making it impossible to aggregate news through portals. They're trying to halt development, to avoid the inevitable, or at least get payed for their inconvenience. I hope they lose, although I'm a little nostalgic on the paper papers behalf too.

Re:The beginning of end of news agencies?

[Thomas Miconi]

As the web continues it's march towards becoming the primary news source, and remains free-and-open, news agencies will suffer.

*sigh* You really don't seem to realise that "the web as a primary news source" is an oxymoron. Because, guess what - real world event don't happen on the web. They happen in the real world (duh!) And you need to have real-world journalists to report on them (double-duh!) They are the primary news source; any website that does not directly employ journalists is, at best, a secondary news source.

The AFP is composed of a few hundred journalists scattered all over the world, who write articles and take pictures on real-world events. The AFP is a major "primary news source". Web-based publications are dependent on AFP and other journalists to produce the content that appears on your screen, even though you don't seem to be aware of this basic fact. Apparently in your world news stories and photographs self-assemble spontaneously from random electronic noise.

Journalists and photographers, believe it or not, need to pay the bills too. So agencies such as AFP sell their stories to publishers (web or paper based), usually in a non-exclusive manner, without redistribution rights. This allows them to pay their journalists, who produce all the hot juicy content that titillates your ocular globes.

I'll make a very simple summary of the case for you:

- Google aggregates articles (and photographs) from public websites, with their permission.

- AFP licenses photographs to websites, without redistribution rights: The websites not allowed to redistribute the picture.

- However, Google harvests AFP-made pictures from websites and happily displays them on GoogleNews.

- AFP says to Google: "Stop that, please"

- Google ignores them

- AFP sues

Got it ?

Thomas-

Re:The beginning of end of news agencies?

[say]

You really don't seem to realise that "the web as a primary news source" is an oxymoron

You perfectly well understood what I was trying to say - "the web is becoming the primary medium (aka. source) for people looking to be enlightened on the latest happenings in the world (aka. news).

My point is that journalism is cheaper than before (because of the digital revolution and other factors), therefore it makes less sense to pay news agencies to do it. I do agree with you that it to a certain degree still makes sense. But they are becoming less important.

Re:The beginning of end of news agencies?

[sparkydevil]

Actually, this is just the beginning. The news agencies business is selling hard-to-find content to newspapers (yes the stuff you can't get on a blog). That business is being eroded, not helped by Google news. The next stage is to stop providing newsfeeds to free access sites. Reuters, AP, AFP will all require a paid site. Welcome to the news subscription net.

Re:Most web-litigious country?

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

They're still pissed that Minitel didn't become the standard instead of the Internet.

Send feedback to AFP

[$exyNerdie]

Send feedback to AFP on what you think of this lawsuit here:

http://www.afp.com/english/afp/?pid=contact


You can always use John Doe's mailing address :-)

parent is a troll!

[nietsch]

ok some gibberish about napoleon who was frensh, tha somehow translates to 'continental' europe, and then something about it arch-rival Germany. This all should prove that the frensh are what exactly?

I suspect some non-continental european is doing some trolling.

And Napolean on was a warmongering dictator, but also a very good statesman that left a very valuable legal legacy behind. And He learnd us to ride on the right side of the road!

Re:Most web-litigious country?

[cabraverde]

[France have] gone after Yahoo, Google (multiple times now), and even taken swings at that incarnation of evil; Project Gutenberg

You're confused. This is a French news agency we're talking about here, not the French state. Same difference as between SCO and the USA. Not the same thing at all, eh?

Ummmmm.....

[varmittang]

So they don't want anyone to find them or their website. OOOOOKKKKKkkkkk. Right.

Like the saying goes: WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION?

[pg110404]

Let me see if get this right.

Google, despite what it is, doesn't exactly go around ripping all the web pages off the internet just because it could. Even now, it still does so by invitation.

AFP has requested google to do so. I'm not sure how google determines what to include and what not to include, but does it not have something to do with metatags? For whatever reason, google cached some pages, they never did want/now they don't want cached.

Now AFP is all in a snit that google has cached content they at least now have determined they don't want cached and they now seek damages.

In anotherwise sane world, would it not simply have been better off to send a cease and desist letter to google saying "THIS IS OFF BOUNDS", and failure to comply, *THEN* sue?

As others posted already, isn't this just a ploy to get an easy 17.5 mil cash grab? They're going straight for the throat, so I'm thinking, "What is your malfunction?????"

It seems SCO is the posterchild of this kind of questionable lawsuit practice in the world today. "OH, WE'VE BEEN WRONGED!!!! QUICK SUE".

Could it be the death of civility is the direct cause of the death of common sense??

Re:Like the saying goes: WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION?

[51mon]

You haven't seen Google news have you.

Re:Like the saying goes: WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION?

[pg110404]

You haven't seen Google news have you.

What exactly do you mean by this? I can't figure out the context.

I have read google news and can make several observations about it, but probably not the kind you're thinking of in reference to your response's parent.

Re:Like the saying goes: WHAT IS YOUR MALFUNCTION?

[pg110404]

They actually sell their content to other webpages so they can display the content.

The point I made from the start is that google plays by a certain set of rules. Those rules govern what pages they cache and what pages they don't cache

AFP can sell their content to whoever they want (say, ACME news), but if google's bots go and grab this content from that web site (in this case ACME), then why the hell is AFP bringing up a lawsuit against google?

Their problem might be with google for displaying it, but that's where the CEASE AND DESIST letter comes in, their first problem is with ACME news for allowing google to cache it in the first place.

I understand the whole point of google not having the licence to do what they did, but just because this scenario might be what happened, does that then mean AVP has the right to automatically sue google directly?

Suppose I told something in confidence to a friend who then told someone else, say a reporter, and it got on the news? Would I be more upset at the reporter who then told the whole world or the friend who betrayed my trust?

This might not be the same thing, but it's pretty close. You start at the source of the problem, then spread out from there.

Yahoo pays AFP for news

[$exyNerdie]

Yahoo's AFP news site:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=index2&cid=1504

Google should do what Microsoft does

[Azureflare]

And link to AFP via yahoo!

You avoid the litigation issue of foreign countries at any rate.

Re:Don't go there!

[truesaer]

A Robot trawling the site and a news aggregator specifically reusing headlines, content and images from the site are two completely different things. Just because AFP doesnt disallow the googlebot from trawling doesnt mean they give up the copyright to the content.

I fail to see the distinction. If you crawl their website just for the search page, then when I type in search terms that hit on their site in the regular search box I'm going to get the title of their site as a blue link, and some of the text that was on the site for context information. That text is the exact same thing that they're enraged about Google displaying on the news site, is it not?

They're probably looking for a quick settlement, but I hope googlebot has a blacklist of site that aren't indexed at all. If you want to sue Google for indexing your site into a news aggregator, it is only sensible for Google to not index your site at all...who knows what you'll sue for next.

The Law Doesn't Read that Way

[Onimaru]

Legally speaking, yes you do, at least in America. Courts has struggled with the question of giving notice by publication, and have eventually come up with the standard of "reasonably calculated to give actual notice, and only in cases where individual notice is impossible or unduly burdensome."

An English language notice is not reasonably calculated to give actual notice, unless they really think there are 50,000 old ladies at Google reading each indexed link. And individual notice would have been easy. Just call Google (if you are too lazy, greedy, or stupid to actually fix the "problem").

You're also going to get into issues with promissory estoppel here. This is the equivalent of having a book of "free," but copyrighted, cover sheet designs from your local copier and waiting for the litigo-terrorism hilarity to ensue.

Sorry for the language, but as a big fan of the law I get pretty peeved when people try to twist a technicality into making the law a sword rather than a shield.

AFP

[jalet]

sucks !

A bunch of stupid ass holes.

and yes, I'm french

A Fix?

[zotz]

Could this be fixed by ISPs putting in their TOS that you are not allowed to make any content available on the net unless you are willing to have it freely copied with a minimum of a copyleft license?

Would this work? If not, why not? If not, could it be made to work after a simple tweak?

all the best,

drew

http://www.peercast.org/

Project Gutenberg?

[Cappy Red]

I missed that one. Who went after PG and when? This sounds too interesting to just let slip by.

Re:Project Gutenberg?

[spaeschke]

I overstated it, there was nothing legal to it. However, the French librarian association got all in a huff over Project Gutenberg's bias towards English, and felt that French wasn't strongly enough represented.

It basically just boils down to a tremendous fear that between English, Spanish and Chinese, French is becoming an inconsequential language.

Re:Project Gutenberg?

[Cappy Red]

Ah, thanks. :-)

Idiots

[p0rnking]

They're suing Google for $17.5 mil, but how much more have they made since Google has been linking to them?

Robots.txt

[Anonymous Coward]

No mention of the robots instruction file for indexing int he article. Did the French agency bother to tell google what they could or could not index, or are they sueing google because they don't know how to configure their own site?

Re:Don't go there!

[houghi]

I find it very strange that they do not disallow the entire site if they mind Googles robot finding and showing their news

Why do we say we want an opt-in for email, but when it comes to google and websites, we want an opt-out?

The robots.txt should say what to scan, not what not to scan.

Re:Don't go there!

[Anonymous Coward]

By having a robots.txt file they

1) acknowledge that they understand that search engines are reading their site
2) acknowledge that they understand that they are able to prevent search engines from reading their site
3) requested search engines to not read a portion of their site

and now they're suing Google for reading the rest of the site. Take your rifle, put it in your mouth and pull the trigger, you're too stupid to live with the rest of us here.

Re:Most web-litigious country?

[Mr. Underbridge]

You're confused. This is a French news agency we're talking about here, not the French state. Same difference as between SCO and the USA. Not the same thing at all, eh?

OK, amend that to read "A lot of French assholes." Better?

Sue everyone...

[PhatCobra]

Everyone should just sue everyone else. Sure, that will solve all our problems. Google news POINTS to images that are already readily available to anyone with an internet connection... there is nothing wrong with that... if it is already readily available and google just points to it and points it out for you and says "look at this thing that is out there somewhere"... there should be no issues here.

From the article:

[Khuffie]

"We allow publishers to opt out of Google News but most publishers want to be included because they believe it is a benefit to them and to their readers," Google spokesman Steve Langdon said of the AFP lawsuit.

So...if they didn't like it, they could have opted out...

Not illegal duplication

[Mr. Underbridge]

Legally speaking, there is absolutely no reason why I should have to put a robots.txt file on my site to keep my copyrighted information from being illegally duplicated by Google.

1). Google isn't duplicating anything except headlines. That likely comes under fair use. 2) Because they KNEW they could easily keep google from doing that using robots.txt and NEVER sent a C&D, it's going to be really hard to get damages. They might get be able to get google to stop doing it - and I doubt even that - but the chances for damages is low, since they knew they could stop the so-called damage at any time.

Also, how does this hurt them? It will be hard to claim that when google drives people to their site and increases their revenue. Ultimately, if AFP wants to isolate themselves from the world, go right ahead.

Re:Not illegal duplication

[snorklewacker]

2) Because they KNEW they could easily keep google from doing that using robots.txt and NEVER sent a C&D, it's going to be really hard to get damages.

How do you know they didn't? Most companies don't publicize the C&D letters they get, unlike individuals with a spotlight/soapbox/forum...

Re:Not illegal duplication

[Mr. Underbridge]

How do you know they didn't? Most companies don't publicize the C&D letters they get, unlike individuals with a spotlight/soapbox/forum...

Fair point, though I'd have thought google would have been more proactive about things had they received one and it would have leaked out in some way. Guess we'll see?

It'll still be interesting to see how damages are calculated when the "damage" is increasing the revenue of the plaintiff.

AFP basically belongs to the French government

[Nice2Cats]

Remember that AFP is not really a business the way that AP or Reuters is -- so much of it belongs to the French government that it probably would be considered a "semi-offical" news agency if it were located in some African or Arab country instead of Franch.

In other words, they aren't really a business the way the other news agencies are. You don't see Reuters out there suing Google, and for good reason.

Well, this is now news...

[ebob9]

Since it's on Google News..

link

Re:Don't go there!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google uses other AFP articles from other news sites which have paid AFP to use the articles and images.
And as you might have guessed, AFP has no access to these robots.txt files...

Funny how google threatened to sue rss scrapers

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/33 34651

the company requested the removal of RSS-powered Google News headlines from his Ecademy business networking site and made it clear Webmasters are not allowed to display headlines from Google News on third-party sites.

oh the irony

Re:Doesn't France have...

[Anonymous Coward]

The country is clearly run by madmen with no grasp of reality

sorry are we talking about USA now ?

RSS

[scaltagi_the_pirate]

Does this have any implications to sites which aggregate news through RSS sources? Just a question.

If AFP is a news agency...

[westlake]

Why can't people see that far from stealing their customers, Google drives visitors to their sites?

Newspapers, radio and tv, aren't likely to appreciate direct competiton from a press service they help subsidize.

Apparently the French are still angry with...

[Xibo]

an old issue regarding the "French Military Victories" google results.

The Value of News Agencies

[hotsauce]

I'm not sure the value of news agencies has anything to do with the medium in which news is delivered. As long as people desire news, news agencies will be useful. Google certainly seems to find AFP useful, and so do lots of other news sites.

There is a big debate going on (fueled by Apple supposedly sueing bloggers) over whether bloggers can be good journalists, much less news agencies. Almost all blogs I've seen are very high on opinion, and somewhat lower on facts and investigation. Uninformed opinion a news agency does not make.

There is an interesting parallel with OSS of course, and OSS /has/ lead to high quality products. The question is whether OSS produces high quality end products, or high quality frameworks. It's possible that like blogs and news agencies, commercial and OSS operate on different yet complementary planes.

As with OSS, there also remains the question of how the free beer model pays for college (where you learn programming and journalism) and a family.

France doesn't understand what the internet is

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet is not a library. The internet is not a broadcast. The internet is not a painting.

Somebody needs to sit these AFP fruitbags down and explain to them what a hyperlink is.

L'hyperlien:

Une image ou une partie de texte sur une Page Web qui est liée à une autre Page Web, sur le même emplacement ou dans un autre emplacement de Web.

Re:France doesn't understand what the internet is

[gberke]

I rather like the gentle epithet "fruitbag"...
1) the notion that I can't link to you does rather screw up the whole notion of the internet...

2) AFP has access to adquate protections, as to all publishers on the web: eg, you can't look at content unless you are signed in, and that applies to links. There are TONS of sites that restrict access to their sites to subscribers... like, the NY times and ALL the investment services...

3)looking back, I think "fruitbag" was probably all that was needed.

Re:Most web-litigious country?

[spacefrog]

Bullshit. You would be advised to actually learn what in the hell you are talking about before opening your mouth.

AFP exists under special charter from the French government, and the AFP's primary client is (drum roll) the French government. The French government is financed by whom? Oh yes, the French taxpayers.

To directly quote Wikipedia, "The primary client of AFP is the French government, which purchases subscriptions for its various services. In practice, those subscriptions are somewhat a subsidy to AFP, which is insecure financially. AFP statutes prohibit direct government subsidies."

AFP could not survive without that cash from the French government, so equating them with the French State is the only reasonable conclusion that can be made.

Not that there is anything wrong with them being, for all intents and purposes, part of the French State, but face it. They are!

Re:they did

[roman_mir]

From TFA: what Google ignored was a request to remove the news links to the AFP site. The robots.txt file was ignored earlier I suppose.

Re:Most web-litigious country?

[Anonymous Coward]

so if the BBC sued someone for copyright infringment it would the the British government who were doing it? No, it wouldn't, yet the BBC exists under special charter from the British government, and is financed by the television license, which is paid by the British public. The BBC could not survive without this cash, which is in essence coming from the government.

So hows about you take your unfounded fucked up attitude towards the french and shove it up your arse?

New FR Hobby: Sue Google....

[Rolan]

You can't tell me this isn't true...

They should add a HTML tag, noindex

[NigelJohnstone]

There should be an extra tag

[noindex]....... [/noindex]

So that *parts* of a page can be excluded from indexing.

AFP could then put that in their story text it gives to other sites.

AFP already lose...

[DelawareBoy]

I hope I'm not representative of the masses, but I am usually too busy to look at the article.. (Slashdot included..).

I go to google to see the blurb / synopsis, and move on. I never hit the original site. Sure, I'm a l0s3r. But, in my case, Google is definately giving me something something from AFP that I never would get from them in the first place.

I guess the courts will decide if that is a crime or not.

rof,l

[rah1420]

... This is so SCO it's not even funny.

Very good. Worth a sig.

Yes, But...Maybe Not

[reallocate]

AFP is not a web site. AFP was/is a wire service, just like AP, Reuters, etc. It really isn't in the retail news sales business. In effect, it wholesales its products to retail news outlets like newspapers, radio/TV stations, etc. Those purchasers are well aware of AFP's existence and don't need Google to remind them. So far as I know, AFP's products aren't priced for individual use, and it doesn't host any subscription-based intended for individual consumers.

In other words, there aren't any AFP sites for Google to drive customers to.

If Google is indexing AFP content on sites that pay for it, then perhaps AFP has a problem with those sites, not Google.

Not A Fair Use Issue

[reallocate]

Fair use does not encompass reproduction and distribution of the entirety of a work.

If Google News is indexing and presenting content on publicly accessible web sites, I don't think they've got much to worry about. If they are indexing content on sites that aren't publicly accessible -- intended for access by paying customers only -- and have not entered into an agreement with that source to access and index the content, that's another story, as well as an issue for that site's security guy.

Re:Google's public now. Lawyers smell blood.

[justins]

They are French lawyers. They smell cheese.

Re:Even Google is not above the law.

[notque]

Even Google is not above the law.

Where are the internet laws perchance?

Can we go back to no one really using the web except geeks? The only advances by having the rest of the net on are more e-commerce and those funny forum images like the bunny with a pancake on it's head.

I can live without that.

Re:Googlezon is Coming

[gotscheme]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133481

AFP is claiming that...

[zogger]

....what they do is illegal as well then. Their reporters take pictures and don't bother to secure copyright licenses from whomever got photographed, or for reproduced images of the buildings in the background, etc, in many cases, same as all other news businesses. They quote people and don't secure the copyright license to that persons "speech", their "creation". What's really the big difference? This is how news is done, google puts up pages on the "news", with links and a very short intro to the story quoted, as if the news itself was a "news story". Near as I can tell it is 100% fair use. I expect the court to dismiss the claims. I think AFP is just trying to shakedown google to purchase content, like they sell to online and print guys and broadcasters. Now if Google reproduced the entire thing and called it it's own, that would be a different story, they should pay for it, but it's not, so it isn't, and they therefore don't.

Re:Don't go there!

[roadrunnerro]

actually they can - they could show a different page to GoogleBot...

humor impairment, part deux

[justins]

That is a really great analogy. What a clever refutation of what I wrote. Keep up the good work!

Re:France bashing

[northcat]

I think parent's troll mod is way of slashdot telling us non-americans that we are inferior to americans and we should go away. At least there seems to be a general consensus about american superiority on slashdot and most american communication forums. Bye bye all.

Legally BInding?

[nurb432]

But inst robots.txt only about being polite and not an actual binding contract?

If its been published publically, then they dont have much of a leg to stand on, as long as they get the credit for the 'source'. "fair use"

Re:Legally BInding?

[DarkEdgeX]

If it bothers them so much, and it seems robots.txt isn't used for News, then why didn't they simply block all connections coming from Google (or, at least, go back in their logs and see which addresses the bot comes from)?

I will be amused when they lose this though.

Re:Legally BInding?

[ePhil_One]

But inst robots.txt only about being polite and not an actual binding contract?

Yep. Its a "convention"; webmasters use robots.txt to communicate what parts of their site should not be indexed, because the content might be transient (Not there when the user follows the search engine link), or have other reasons not to want it indexed (Preventing comment spam). If a webmaster makes a page publically available, they inherently don't have a say in who reads it. Web sites are billboards, not private homes (unless you secure it with a password or other effective scheme).

Now, whether Google has a right to offer their content, or whether Fench law or American law or even Quatars laws apply is a whole 'nuther story..

Re:Who Cares?

[madstork2000]

The attitude of "F**k 'Em" is a little over the top, but the US companies effected by the frivolous, unwarranted lawsuits should actively seek to ban French users and block indexing of all french sites. Imagine all the French folks who depend on Google to promote their sites, or to augment their income with Adsense. Chances are they would be pretty ticked, and hopefully would blame their elitist self rightous government.

I have no personal gripes against French people. I have several French friends. However, it sure seems lately like there are a few bad apples that typify the Anti-USA crowd. I almost get the feeling that they are purposely trying to be anti-USA/anti-British so they can get a competive advantage with the anti-west world. These lawsuits seem politically motivated and another way to "stick it to the US".

I honestly wonder if terrorists flew a 747 into the Eiffel tower if France would be so anti-war/anti-US? I sincerely doubt it.

Anyway, if I was Google I'd simply block indexing on any site hosted in France. I'd also block access to any IP orginating in France. As far as the internet stuff goes France seems a bit overzealous as far as sueing high-profile American companies.

-MS2k

Using this kind of language...

[vikingpower]

... impresses nobody. Neither here nor on your so-called-consulting site.

Signed by: a software developer who worked with you, who knows you, and who is sure by personal experience that YOU SUCK both at development and at keeping your girlfriend faithful.

( develish laugh in the background ) :-D

Re:Using this kind of language...

[jalet]

For the first part of your signature, and if we speak about the same work experience, I doubt that many of our old colleagues would say the same since they used our tools every day long without complaining...

For the second part though, don't let some strange scene you saw only once and from which you probably missed the beginning impress you like this. Please call her directly and just ask, or maybe we could talk about this privately in a non-anonymouscowardly way :-)

Re:Using this kind of language...

[jalet]

> YOU SUCK both at development

Of course, with skills like yours, as can be seen here http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125892&cid=105 44984

I very much LOVE your comment !

With our marvelous skills how the hell did WE(?) manage to have something which finally worked ?
That is the question...

lol

Mod Parent Up.

[alizard]

These companies don't want to do business with google?

I agree that google should give them exactly what they demand... in abundance.

The idea that any major corporation in a nation with peculiar laws should be permitted to in effect, censor the content of the rest of us doesn't deserve support.

Perhaps it's time for google.fr to replace its eearch page with a single page with no search box... saying "We will do business in France when your nation adopts laws compatible with technological civilization. If this is a problem for you, contact (insert home phone numbers for the President and the most powerful elected public officials in the French government.)

While Google has devolved from it's "do no evil" PR statement (try reporting a Usenet spammer empowered by Google to them... YOU try it, they don't really give a shit... if you want to post MAKE MONEY FAST, use googlegroups)... choosing up sides in a situation like this isn't hard at all.

Re:On the other hand...

[InsaneGeek]

But it's not just links, they copy a portion of the copyrighted content. I'm not saying all stuff should/shouldn't be restricted, but the previous poster said that because there wasn't a password it was "free" if they didn't want it to be free they should have put a password on it.

From a freedom perspective this would be equivalent to instead of taking the entire kernel, incorporating a portion... let's say just the IP stack of the kernel.

Re:Most web-litigious country?

[Anonymous Coward]

"AFP could not survive without that cash from the French government, so equating them with the French State is the only reasonable conclusion that can be made."

There is some fundamentally flawed logic there, and it can be easily exposed with a counter-example: the U.S. airline industry surives (for many reasons) only because of direct federal subsidies; I wouldn't exactly say that Delta or Southwest Airlines is "part" of the U.S. State... would you?

That a business is recieving money from the state simply does not mean it is the same thing as a government department. Implying that the French government's sponsorship of AFP is tantamount to the French government itself suing google is ridiculous.

Re:Google's public now. Lawyers smell blood.

[nomadic]

Now that Google's a publicly traded company flush with cash, many potential litigants are smelling blood.

In this case it's not like they just sprung it on them out of nowhere. They asked Google to remove them, Google refused for some reason.

Re:can't we just like nuke france?

[DarkDust]

A great many europeans say that about americans as well, so be happy that just not liking someone doesn't always result in a nuke being thrown ;-) Earth would be a very lonely place then...

proper credit?

[thEphemeral]

AFP complained that Google was wilfully infringing its copyright by reposting AFP's headlines, lead paragraphs and photos without proper credit on its Google News service. not enough 'proper credit'?? i can't check it, because google has already eliminated all afp news from their site, but usually google news provides a link to the source website. isn't that enough proper credit?

Re:proper credit?

[thEphemeral]

while discussing proper credit, i should probably state that the above quote (missing "s): "AFP complained that Google was wilfully infringing its copyright by reposting AFP's headlines, lead paragraphs and photos without proper credit on its Google News service." was taken from timesonline.co.uk