Wednesday, April 11, 2007

AFP/ Google Agreement

Huh? AFP and Google are friends again. As you may remember, AFP – Agence France-Presse, who employ 1,000s of journalists, and who have been caught plagiarizing Wikipedia – sued Google over the use of their headlines and thumbnails in Google News. Via no one else but AFP’s newswire (I might get sued for posting this fair use snippet):

Agence France-Presse and Google signed a licensing agreement Friday giving the search engine the right to post AFP news and photos and settling a lawsuit filed by AFP two years ago.

A joint statement by the companies said the accord allows the Internet giant to post AFP content on Google News and other services. Details of the pact were not made public.

If Google paid AFP some money to come to this agreement, then they indirectly invite others to also attack Google over usage of their content. However, the deal may also foreshadow something else entirely to come out of AFP’s content – possibly, a deeper integration than mere fair use. Quoting from the statement, the article goes on to say the deal “will enable the use of AFP’s newswire content in innovative, new ways that will dramatically improve the way users experience newswire content on the Internet.” Seeing is believing...

[Thanks Colin C.!]

AFP/ Google Agreement by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

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