AFP sues Google?

[cema]

Agence France Presse has sued Google Inc. (GOOG), alleging the Web search leader includes AFP's photos, news headlines and stories on its news site without permission.

[...]

"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.

Should they win, who is going to read them?

Silly sods.

Comments

[a7sharp9.livejournal.com]

I hope they don't. Slippery slope; the main thing Google has going for it is the implicit trust that search results are not doctored in any way by them - the assumption that what you see is the Internet, not the result of a clandestine editing process. Once the trust is gone, they're cooked.

[arbat.livejournal.com]

Why not? They can post a warning message at the bottom of the page like "not included in the results are the following AFP materials, that we withheld at their request" - and then just provide links, but not in as links - just as text. So that people can type them in.

[a7sharp9.livejournal.com]

This only creates an incentive for every guy running Apache from his basement who is not smart enough to configure robots.txt correctly, but does not like the way his page is indexed by the search engines.

The fine print with exclusions will soon consume the whole space.

[arbat.livejournal.com]

Not if they put the references in the same place where they supposed to be, but provide no auto links. And no quotes. As for the guy with Apache - AFP is unique in that it has enough money to hire lawyers but not enough brains to figure out the value of the free advertising.