Google Inc is in the line of fire for the second time in few months for alleged copyright infringement. This time it is Agence France-Presse (AFP), one of the world's major global news agencies, which is seeking damages worth $17.5 million.
AFP alleges that Google's news service, Google news, which had been given a facelift recently by adding new personalization features, includes AFP's photos, stories and news headlines, which are copywritten materials. These were used by Google without getting the permission of AFP prior to its publishing.
The lawsuit was filed in the district court of Columbia. The main accusation is that AFP sells its news on subscriptions. But Google news lifts the news content and photos from the AFP site and then posts them on Google news. The Google newsreaders then click over to the AFP site. Though this sounds as being beneficial for the traffic of the AFP site and the possibilities for new subscriptions, the problem is according to AFP that Google prints the entire news article from the site rather than just excerpt as done by RSS syndication.
Google spokesman Steve Langdon was quizzed about the lawsuit and said that they (Google) are "reviewing the charge". No legal representation was immeditaly available to comment for AFP.
This is not the first time that Google has been sued on the charge of copyright infringement. A few months earlier Google had been sued by Perfect 10, a publisher of nude photographs in a federal court. On hearing about the lawsuit the president of Perfect 10, Norm Zada, said, "I'm very happy that other people who are 'more respectable' than myself are suing".
According to a ruling made by a US Federal appeals Court, any web site may reproduce and post smaller versions of copyrighted photos. These mini images or thumnail images are allowed to be displayed, however, any site which displays full size, exact replica copies of copywritten photographs is indeed in copyright violation and comitting an offence.
Google news, which can be found at http://news.google.com and is available for numerous Countries and various languages, does seem to follow Federal ruling guidelines, only displaying smaller, thumbnail sized images taken as a snapshot from the news resource where the image is found. Further to this, any extract of headline and text, approximately 30 to 40 words from news sources is done so with a direct link to the source. This is the same with the images shown, simply by clicking on the thumbnail will take the visitor directly to the site, where the information is sourced.
The Google news service is in fact a news search engine and one of some quality it has to be said; like any search engine, information is crawled and snapshots of data are taken from the source site, then a direct link is placed from the search engine to the site is made. Should you not want information to be found usually the robots.txt instructions can solve the problem.
It is difficult to comprehend how AFP see these direct links to information as copyright infringement or indeed how the figure of $17.5 million originated, neither do we understand the AFP point that the whole article and full size images are used on Google news, as no sign of this can be seen on the site so far as we are aware. Of cousrse time and legal fees will tell.
