Boersenreport.de – AFP Suing Google News for $17.5 Million
Call me dense, but why would a news organization sue Google News? This is the second time in a week that Google News has been painted as an evil leech.
AGF is a corporate-level subscription service and is peeved that Google is scraping their headlines, leads, and thumbnailing photos. But in the end, if AGF puts their news onto the web, where is the harm in pointing traffic at it? If Google framed the clickthrough and sold adjacent space, sure, call in the lawyers, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here. Why wouldn’t fair-use come into play here and AGF benefit from the exposure and the potential subscription?
Last week a publisher of a b2b title asked me how I felt about Google eating into his revenue. This same publisher’s parent company has a policy against deep-linking, apparently because a competitor was bypassing the registration system and sending its users deep into their archives.
I don’t know why the news industry sees Google as the enemy. Someone please enlighten me. Beyond that, it all seems to come down to fair-use law.
