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."

Good move

[bogaboga]

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

[crow]

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.

Featured on Google a bad thing?

[bryan8m]

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...

But to actually read the whole story...

[PaulBu]

... 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.

Re:Google should apologise.

[Peter Cooper]

To be fair, agencies like AFP don't rely (or even need) on traffic to their own Web sites. They make all their money by selling their feeds and licencing their articles to other publications which then go out and make the money on advertising, etc. I doubt it'd hit the AFP much (or any agency) if their own sites were totally blacklisted by Google.

Glib?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but accurate.

Either one of two things is true in this case...

1) They don't understand fully how the internet works

2) They're looking to make a quick Euro.

Neither is a very flattering conclusion for a news agency.

I suppose this lawsuit is France's Maginot line against the invading Internet.

Other news sites removed by Google

[Percent Man]

Google also, and much more quietly, is removing [internetnews.com] 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...

Re:Biting the Hand that Feeds them.

[gl4ss]

OK so this is the umpteenth comment modded up that says the same thing: that afp needs google more than google needs afp. newsflash: THAT'S NOT TRUE.

go to afp's homepage [afp.com]. you still think they rely on google for anything? that they want flocks of end-users(consumers) flocking to their site? no. that's not their business. check their 'products' and ask yourself is anyone coming through google likely to shell out money for something titled 'AFP's "ready-to-run" package in Flash format offers complete coverage of the the 2005 Formula 1 racing season'. they don't sell to users reading google news, they sell content for services like google news(and newspapers and whatever).

they're protecting their customers(and so their income source) with this move, if anything.

Internet : the Level Playing Ground?

[SluttyButt]

Apparently not as the AFP sees it. Having the ability to scour the playing ground at speed and unmatched power, it's inevitable the Google will dominate the Net. When that happens, it runs into opportunities untold, and the lesser players who might be a leader in its own right (e.g. AFP) sees that as a right to protect its ground in the open arena.

Ultimately Search Engines' business is to provide information for consumers, and providing that information can come in a variety of manners the consumers are comfortable with e.g., Google News. Having the ability to scour and reporting the most arresting of subjects is seen as a threat to others focussing on narrower subjects.

Instead of copyrighting its subject matters, entities like AFP could and SHOULD leverage on the Internet's openness and exposure to enhance its core subject matter, integrity, and prospect as an attractive business liaisons with consumers.

Likewise, for the big players, they need to take similar notes. If you accepted that this is level playing ground, and small players emerging with much more speed and flexibility that you may have, then having the same integrity and rules applied, you should not switch stands and whine about small players stealing from your treasure chests when all is done and considered fair game based on consumers dogged ingenuity.

Think, make not laws that goverened only your own interests.

Re:Google should apologise.

[natrius]

And if France (and Germany, I haven't forgot them either when they harrassed Yahoo! and eBay) doesn't stop this practice of trying to make American companies subject to their wierd laws it is getting time to just pull the fibers connecting France to the rest of the world.

The lawsuit was filed in America. [slashdot.org]

Re:AFP will now disappear

[Wyatt Earp]

"As a Brit, news.bbc.co.uk is the only news source I check."

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.sla shdot.org/
http://www.jpost.com/
http://www.maar ivintl.com/index.cfm
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/
http://www.a rabnews.com/
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/
http:/ /news.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publicati ons/factbook/index .html
http://news.google.com/
http://www.gulf-da ily-news.com/home.asp
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.

They're thumbnails.

[mcc]

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.

Just to play devil's advocate

[popo]

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.

Re:Google should apologise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Switching away from AFP may be something to think about for them. On the other hand:

1) AFP is relative cheap compared to Reuters or AP

2) How many visitors do come from Google news? This is not only related to the absolute number of visitors Google News has, but also on the chance a site has to be listed No. 1 source for a news (pagerank has a say it seams).

Google didn't respect their robots.txt

[setantae]

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.

Re:Good move

[emilymildew]

My commute to work right now -is- uphill both ways. I told my father about it, and he asked how that was possible.

Uh. I have to go up a hill to get there, and then back down the other side?

My kids are never going to believe me.