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Google Begins Removing AFP From Google News
An anonymous reader writes "Google has began removing web-based content of Paris-Based news agency Agence France Presse (AFP), from the Google News service. This past weekend we reported that the Agence France Presse had sued Google for displaying their photo's, stories, and news headlines on Google News without permission. AFP is seeking damages of around $17.5 million and requested the courts that Google News is not to display any of its copyrighted material. It appears Google is complying with what the AFP is requesting. Google doesn't have a timetable for when all AFP links and content will be removed from Google News, but the company is actively working on the matter, said Steve Langdon, a Google spokesman."
Just to be safe, Google should remove all AFP sites not only from news, but from all portions of Google. Google certainly wouldn't want to risk further harm to AFP by keeping them in any of their indexes.
... one would have to click on it, and whatever ads they are paid for will show up. Quoting 4 lines of what they say within the context of a story should fall under "fair use", IMHO.
I think it is more of a move to discourage "checking news online" in general, not that potential reader is directed to their website through google...
Paul B.
To be fair, agencies like AFP don't rely (or even need) on traffic to their own Web sites. They make all their money by selling their feeds and licencing their articles to other publications which then go out and make the money on advertising, etc. I doubt it'd hit the AFP much (or any agency) if their own sites were totally blacklisted by Google.
Google also, and much more quietly, is removing the National Vanguard, known as a racist neo-Fascist organization, from its list of news sources. This raises the question, how the heck did a site like National Vanguard (no, I won't link to it) wind up on Google's list of news sources in the first place?
And the battle between the good of free speech and the good of shutting up morons continues...
OK so this is the umpteenth comment modded up that says the same thing: that afp needs google more than google needs afp. newsflash: THAT'S NOT TRUE.
go to afp's homepage. you still think they rely on google for anything? that they want flocks of end-users(consumers) flocking to their site? no. that's not their business. check their 'products' and ask yourself is anyone coming through google likely to shell out money for something titled 'AFP's "ready-to-run" package in Flash format offers complete coverage of the the 2005 Formula 1 racing season'. they don't sell to users reading google news, they sell content for services like google news(and newspapers and whatever).
they're protecting their customers(and so their income source) with this move, if anything.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
And if France (and Germany, I haven't forgot them either when they harrassed Yahoo! and eBay) doesn't stop this practice of trying to make American companies subject to their wierd laws it is getting time to just pull the fibers connecting France to the rest of the world.
The lawsuit was filed in America.
The thumbnails all directly link to the place where they appeared, where the copyright line may be clearly seen in full. Whether that line is visible on google news doesn't matter; the courts at least in America seem to have been pretty clear that if you thumbnail an image linked somewhere else and link the original, this isn't publishing and any copyright issues that image may hold aren't relevant because only the actual host is publishing the image, you're just linking it.
if this were being done by a site that everyone loves to hate, I think people would tend to side with AFP.
No I think if this were anyone else we'd be instead of concentrating on "OMFG IT'S GOOGLE" concentrating on the real issue, which is that AFP is expecting the traditional concepts of fair use that every website that's ever excerpted something and then linked it-- you know, which google news didn't invent-- to be reordered for them.
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