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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[jerw134]

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

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!

[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!

[someonewhois]

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

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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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]

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.

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...

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.

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: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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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-

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 :-)

Yahoo pays AFP for news

[$exyNerdie]

Yahoo's AFP news site:

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

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.

AFP

[jalet]

sucks !

A bunch of stupid ass holes.

and yes, I'm french

Re:AFP pictures on Yahoo! too

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

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...

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: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.

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: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?

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.