Monday, March 21, 2005

AFP sues Google

AFP Sues Google for copyright violation

Google News has been crawling all over new websites and grabbing news headlines, story excerpts and photographs. AFP - a french news agency - has disagreed with this and has demanded that Google remove such links and excerpts from its site, and since Google has not done that (has it now done that?) AFP is suing Google for $17.5 million.

Google claims it "allow[s] publishers to opt out of Google News, but most publishers want to be included because they believe it is a benefit to them and to their readers."

In other words, Google by default crawls and includes every website and it is upto the news agency to explicitely ask to be removed. The option they provide is "Opt out". I think Google will lose this case and pay up. Google should have gone for "Opt in" and though a painful process, should have gone through legally defensible way of offering a service.

Let us see.

1 comment:

  1. Google new actually increases your web traffic right ? The give only the snippet of the news for full story u have to go the newspaper...Opt in would haev been a pretty long process...4500 news sites from different country optin would not have worked ..

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