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'm not sure they care. Aren't they being paid for in large part (or at least heavily subsidized) by the government, like BBC?

[cema.livejournal.com]

AFP? I don't know.

Of course, they will be read anyway. They provide source pictures and reports for many other news agencies.

[arbat.livejournal.com]

Silly? Nothing can be dumber.
Google should counter by offering to remove any reference to any AFP-related material from any and all their searches.

[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.

[email-animal.livejournal.com]

Google, as well as any other search engine routinely caches copyrighted images. Heck, our own browsers routinely cache copyrighted images. Theoretically, generating web pages with " < img src="" > " tags that include copyrighted sources is less of an offence than keeping a copyrighted image on your hard drive (w/o) permission.

But then, there are always libraries... They let people read a book THEY HAVE NOT PAID MONEY FOR! We should sue them immediately....

[email-animal.livejournal.com]

Another side of it is freedom of linking. So far, there has not been a prcedent that would state that I am not allowed to put an " < a href = "url" > " tag into my/b> HTML page for an arbitrary publically available URL.

Are they saying that cema should pay them for saying "Here is a link from AFP, in which they accuse Google of stealing their information"?

[email-animal.livejournal.com]

Argh... sorry for missed < /b>.

[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.

[cema.livejournal.com]

It may come to that.