Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[JimIvey]

http://thebosh.com/archives/2005/03/google_starts_t.php

AFP (Agence France Presse) sued Google over copyright, and Google is complying by removing AFP stories from Google News.

I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing -- or even a wise thing from AFP's perspective.  Here's where I found the story (I thought it would be ironic to look it up in Google News):

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=google+afp&btnG=Search+News
 (http://tinyurl.com/63hol)

Google doesn't replicate entire news stories as far as I can tell.  They only publish the headline, a few sentences, the name of the publication and date -- along with your search terms highlighted and some hopefully relevant search links.  Due to the limited content, it could be considered "fair use."

And, I would think AFP would want readers not aware of their journalistic prowess to learn of them through search sites such as Google or Yahoo!.  Although, France has been making a name for itself in the Internet, regulating content available to the entire world.  In 2001, a French judge ruled that eBay must remove all Nazi memorabilia from its site.  Not from its French site -- http://www.ebay.fr/ -- but instead from its U.S. site (which, of course, can be seen in France).  

The French Court didn't say whether French content providers should be subject to fundamentalist Muslim laws for putting up R-rated content all over the place, the penalty for which can be rather severe.  But that's a digression into international law and not really an IP issue -- although perhaps IP pokes far enough into International law to make the digression interesting, if not on topic.

Regards.

[Isaac]

Some of the articles I have seen suggest that Google was
also showing AFP's photographs.  If that's the case and the display
was not of mere thumbnails, I think the fair use argument is
a tougher one to make.

[JimIvey]

I didn't see anything but thumbnails.  If you (or anyone) has a link to what may have been objectionable, I'd be curious to see it.

I wonder if the objectionable part was the caching that Google does.  I actually think that's a good thing -- helping mitigate the slashdot effect and similar phenomena to some degree.

Incidentally, the "slashdot effect" is the sudden and dramatic rise in traffic to a site immediately following a post on http://www.slashdot.org.  It has brought many a server to its knees.

Regards.