AFP sues Google
AFP, the French equivalent of the Associated Press is suing Google for copyright infringement. Google’s web crawlers collect news stories from around the internet. AFP has sued them for 3 types of infringement: for publishing their headlines, reprinting their photos, and stripping copyright info from their material. Of course, there are scripts and commands that AFP could use on it’s web site to prevent Google from collecting this info. So the question AFP is asking is: why should we have to go to the trouble and expense of preventing their grabbing our material, shouldn’t the copyright notice itself be enough?
This one’s interesting. It boils down to: is aggregating a limited subset of others’ material fair use, since it does link back to the original source? Is my summarizing like this fair use? Preventing Google, doesn’t necessary prevent me, because my process isn’t automated. Hmmm. See the internetnews.com article.
