Thursday, March 24, 2005

AFP Hurting Own Customers

French news agency AFP recently sued Google for including their copyrighted work in Google News, and Google already reacted by removing AFP’s content. Not everyone’s happy though, as Nathan Weinberg writes in InsideGoogle:

“One news website, Political Gateway, released a particularly emotional article/editorial, where they basically credit Agence France-Presses with killing them as a website. Their story: They paid for AFP content, so when Google began removing AFP content from Google News, they removed Political Gateway entirely. All efforts to get them put back in, including removing anything resembling AFP content, have fallen on deaf ears. As they say, “We are no longer a viable news source”.

This truly proves how clueless AFP is. They are a business, concerned with selling supposedly valuable content to news organizations. By not contacting any of their customers before engaging in a reckless legal action against the world’s most popular content finder, they did their customers a disservice, and gave them no time to save themselves.”

Political Gateway writes:

“No matter how you look at it, AFP will lose this battle. It is inherently just an attempt to extort money out of Google. What AFP does not realize is how badly they have damaged their clients. Political Gateway is one of their clients and we have been devastated.”

AFP Hurting Own Customers by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

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