Google sued by AFP over News.Google.Com

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...lines-business

Comical lawsuit, IMO

If you've ever used Google news

http://news.google.com

And you should, best news aggregator out there, you read the headlines, and if something is interesting enough that it piques your interest, you click that headline and it takes you to the story.

Google is essentially a shop window selling AFP's products and they've repaid the free space Google has made available via a lawsuit.

Smart folks.

Quote:

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Google Sued Over Use of News Material

From Reuters


Agence France-Presse has sued Google Inc., alleging that the Internet search leader includes AFP's news stories, headlines and photos on its website without permission.

The Paris-based news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP material, according to the suit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Neither executives of Mountain View, Calif.-based Google nor lawyers for AFP could be reached for comment on the suit.

AFP sells subscriptions to its content and does not provide it free.

Google gathers photos and news stories from around the Web and posts them on its news site, which is free to users.

"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 charges in its lawsuit.

AFP said that it had informed Google it was not authorized to use AFP's copyrighted material as it did and that it had asked Google to stop.

Google has ignored those requests, AFP's suit alleges.

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Google should lower the search score of every AFP link in its respository to zero. Make it so folks who search Google for "AFP" find everything but the Agence France-Presse.

oops

and again

Actually, I think AFP has a good point. I've googled and found fragments of stuff that is normally a paid subscription service.

Google is basically enabling people to steal AFP's content. It seems reasonable that Google should stop if asked.

Not googles fault.

1. it drives visitors to their site, and lists if said site is a subscription site.

2. google is not responsible for AFP's lack of web security. And I bet google argues this point.

3. Why complain now? if it was a problem, i bet contacting google and asking them to stop using their site as a news source would have done the trick. perhaps they found out google is worth somethink like 15 billion dollars.