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

[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

[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

[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.

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!

[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.

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?

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...

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: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.

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.