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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."
AFP or APF or FP?
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
Good move Google but what happens if every news organization sues or threatens to sue? Where shall we get our news from?
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.
I would think that the news agency would want to be featured on Google to attract more visitors to its site! Apparently they are simply out for money when no damage has actually been done. Sure it's copyrighted material...
Will probably to sink AFP into the very very bottom of search results if not absent totally. AFP might have the right, but I'm sure they know the consequences of dealing with the #1 search engine.
This scene is somewhat reminiscent of the scene from the Incredibles where victims of crimes start suing the superheroes for helping them.
Google has become the doorway to the internet. Your site doesn't exist until Google indexes it. Anyone who sues them isn't trying to prevent copyright infringement or reproduction of their data, they are most likely looking for a reason to press charges and make a quick franc.
Maybe something like,
We are very very sorry for linking to you from our side of the interweb. Rest assured, Google.com will never link to your site again.
Have a nice day.
Whatver reputation the French may have in the US as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," this incident proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that when carrying a firearm, the French will not hesitate to use deadly force against their own feet.
... 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.
AFP make their money by selling their stories to other media organizations. If they allow their news to be disseminated without the appropriate fee being paid (as Google News is doing), they will be cutting off their main source of revenue.
All AFP is doing is using legitimate means to protect a legitimate business model.
Am I missing some obvious reason that you're using AFP and APF acronyms interchangeably? The wire service's name is AFP.
Kriston
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...
If they allow their news to be disseminated without the appropriate fee being paid (as Google News is doing),
If a link, a headline and a half-paragraph quotation is "disseminating", we're all fucked.
Can't wait to see where we go next with this amazing new logic. "Amazon.com book reviews banned in france because people were quoting sentences from the books they reviewed, the book companies make their money by selling those books to customers, if they allow those sentences to be disseminated without the appropriate fee (as amazon.com book reviewers do) they will be cutting off their main source of revenue"...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Er... "dinosaur"? "Certain destruction"? "Old methods of business"?
Listen, e-vangelising is all well and good - sometimes. Other times, we actually *need* these old-methods companies. Say AFP folds; who, then, gathers the news which Google collates? Google sure as hell doesn't. They index, and that's all.
AFP, BBC, ABC, Reuters; whatever, whoever: the fact is, these organisations are essential if we are to continue to receive cutting-edge, informative news from around the world.
AFP doesn't want to "defend a natural monopoly". It wants to ensure that it obtains sufficient revenue to allow it to continue to pay its journalists, without whom Google News would be largely pointless.
Everyone loves Google, so it's easy to mock AFP. But if this were being done by a site that everyone loves to hate, I think people would tend to side with AFP.
As a side note, Agence France Presse is one of the Big Three (with AP and Reuters). It takes great pride in the quality of its photography.
http://www.resourceshelf.com/legaldocs/afpvgoogle1 .pdf
British. Although the world's largest news outlet, 90% of its revenues come from selling financial data.
Oh god... please... stop this. AFP is a massive, globally recognised news organisation. Just because they're not on Google News doesn't mean they will sink into a void. The French - to their enormous credit - are fiercely nationalistic. You're not French (forgive the assumption, but I'm fairly sure it's valid) and therefore have no idea as to the scope of AFP's influence within France. It's like saying "if the BBC refuse to allow Google to index their content, BBC News will disappear within a month!!". Utter, complete nonsense. As a Brit, news.bbc.co.uk is the only news source I check. Google News can go jump. The whole world does not think like you, America. Sorry if that upsets you.
"As a Brit, news.bbc.co.uk is the only news source I check."
a shdot.org/r ivintl.com/index.cfm/ a rabnews.com// /news.bbc.co.uk/i ons/factbook/index .htmla ily-news.com/home.asp
And people say Americans don't look close enough at things outside the US for thier own good.
The BBC is good, but like CNN and Reuters, it can not be considered good enough to be the only source of news for a person.
Not only am I an American, I'm one of those terrible "neo-con" "red-staters". You know the type of person that is working for a Jewish cabel and watches nothing but Fox News and listens to Limbaugh all the time.
In my News Menu
http://www.drudgereport.com/
http://www.sl
http://www.jpost.com/
http://www.maa
http://www.haaretzdaily.com
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/
http://www.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/
http:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publicat
http://news.google.com/
http://www.gulf-d
http://news.ft.com/home/us
It's Israeli and Middle East heavy because that's my speciality, well Ottoman 16th century till now in the Middle East.
I check all of those at least once a day.
AFP's business model isn't to run a service to deliver news to readers directly. What they do is sell content to news organizations. This means that if you run a newspaper, you pay AFP for the right to reprint their stories.
Google is getting the AFP content from these newspapers as a third party, and not as a subscriber to AFP, who probably don't give a rat's ass at the moment about making you go over to their site. You, as an individual who reads the news, are not their customer.
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.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"so everybody stops buying from de facto newswire because it's not on google news, which doesn't really matter at all in the 'rest of the world'?"
No. Re-read the story.
AFP sells photos to different news organizations. The NYT, London Times, Washington Post, Hong Kong, Tokoy, pretty much everywhere.
Those newspapers *WANT* Google to index their pages. What AFP is doing is preventing 3rd parties from being indexed by Google.
So the end result will be that news sites sill be less likely to use AFP photos, because once they do, they will not be indexed by Google.
Hope that's clearer why not being on google will damage AFP in a way they don't comprehend. Its almost as if they don't understand the Internet. But that's not surprising since they still advertise that you should call them on an ISDN line. Welcome to 1990.
They really don't get it.
google is removing France from Google Maps...
-pyrrho
Before I get totally flamed, let me start by saying Google News is my homepage, and its the first thing I look at every morning. I'm a huge fan.
That having been said...
IANAL but I honestly don't understand how Google News can possibly be legal.
Forgeting for a moment whether or not ad revenue is eventually generated by all those linked-to sites: The question of whether or not legal-permission is required to link to a sub-level of another site is a legal issue from way back when.
Back in 1997 (if memory serves) I remember it was ruled that paid content sites needed to seek permission before linking to the sublevel of another paid content site. Search engines were where the law got blurry. Google News! however doesn't seem like much of a search engine -- but I suppose one could make the argument that there is indeed search technology at work behind the scenes. From a user perspective however, Google News seems more like a content aggregator.
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> France is an insignificant piss ant country, not so much a nation as a rabble united by a variety of cheeses.
Wow, you look like an intelligent person capable of insightful discussion, now, grats.
> AFP is nothing compared to the Beeb.
Indeed. Let me explain it for you slowly : the BBC and AFP are not in the same business. BBC gives news to citizens, while AFP gives news to BBC (and about all newspapers in the world).
> How many shortwave programs does AFP broadcast?
Let me explain it for you slowly : AFP doesn't broadcast anything, they sell news to newspapers.
> The Beeb could get along quite well without Google News
And AFP doesn't give a fuck about google news, since, they're not a newspapers. Every major newspapers in the world is a customer of AFP. NYT, BBC, Washington Post, The Economist, all of them buy content and pictures from AFP. AFP is as widely known and as widely respected as Reuters. Both of them are the first and most respected content provider of every newspapers in the world. Without Reuters and AFP, you would more or less see no pictures on any newspapers. If you don't believe me, buy the NYT, and look for credits on their pictures. 90% of them are from AFP and Reuters.
You and I are not custumers of AFP, NYT, BBC and all are.
Basically, Google News is trying to take AFP work without paying for it. AFP is not happy with that, and they have every right to be, since Google is effectivly warezing from them.
This lawsuit has nothing to do with the French lawsuit on Yahoo, which was quite stupid. This lawsuit is very valid, and Google removing their content shows that they know they would loose in a lawsuit.
Next time you launch in a flamefest, try to educate yourself, you really do look like a moron talking out of his ass.
AFP is big in France.
AFP is big all over the world. There are 3 real global news agencies, AP, AFP and Reuters (in no particular order).
Hell, they're even "big" in the US ! Look at Yahoo's top stories, check out the sources (upper right corner). Guess who comes third, right behind AP and Reuters ?
In other parts of the world (say, the Arab world or western Africa), AFP happens to dominate. It has more to do with politics and language than anything else, but still, they're not just big in France.
How many shortwave programs does AFP broadcast? And in what languages? Let's see, the answer would be none and none. Hell, the Beeb broadcasts in multiple languages.
Wow. Congratulations, you just discovered that a news agency is not the same as a media corporation (Hint: how many AP / Reuters programs are syndicated on public radio in the United States ? How many shortwave programs do AP and Reuters broadcast ?)
If you want French media, you should look at TV5 (French-language international television) or Radio-France Internationale (radio services in 19 languages).
Thomas-
I don't see why AFP are being painted as the bad guys here.
They have a robots.txt that excludes their news articles, and yet Google is/was indexing them. Bad Google.
AFP: Being on the front page of one the most popular websites in the world is bad for us. We estimate that it has caused us $17.5 million!
Person 1: How has it done that!?
AFP: All those hits on our website caused us to go over our bandwidth limit!
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