Google News to Host Wire Service Stories 63
knhasan writes to tell us that Google has just announced a new program in which they will host wire news stories directly on their site. This is widely believed to be the first concrete fallout from recent troubles with Agence France Presse (who sued Google for alleged copyright infringement) among other wire services. "The new feature unveiled Friday is called 'duplicate detection,' which lets Google News identify the original source of a story that may appear in tens or hundreds of news outlet Web sites. If the source story is from one of the four news service agencies that Google has licensing agreements with, Google will display the story on a page that it hosts."
Re:It's a good thing (Score:5, Informative)
Hundreds of websites run the same identical AP/AFP/Reuters/UPI/Etc. wire services news story. Until now, G news would show ALL of those stories.
Now, when it detects a story that is from a wire service and just reposted, it will show it on the Gnews site, as Gnews has a subscription for all of them (except AFP apparently.)
However, if the Corner Podunk Press writes an original story on the shuttle launch, it too will be linked.
The loser here are news sites that do run wire service stories as they will no longer be getting free traffic from Gnews. This might encourage them to be more original.