AFP versus Google News

Agence France-Presse (AFP) has filed a lawsuit against Google News for allowing AFP copyright pictures headlines and stories to appear via Google News service.

Google does not spider material from the AFP site itself, but from the agency’s clients who pays for AFP for the content. This means that it will be hard for Google’s newsbot to automatically identify and ignore all AFP material.
The important thing to notice here is that Google News does not copy entire articles. Google takes one or two line excerpt and deep links to the content site. If the Google News users want to read the entire article he must go to the AFP client site.

Finding content and guiding users to it is what a search engine is all about and the core in searching the Internet is indexing of text. If every content provider down to every single blogger and journalist should be asked and give permission before spiders could have access to their site the entire Internet would be crippled.

I think that the french still are annoyed that www outperformed Minitel..

les jours vieux bons

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>