An article in InADaily.com says the Google is backing off from a lawsuit filed by Agence France Presse. In an earlier blog story that I posted a week ago titled, “French Fries Google With Copyright Lawsuit Again” I pointed out that Agence France Presse (AFP) had filed a $17.5 million lawsuit against the California search giant for indexing its headlines, photographs and news snippets.
Instead of using the common robots.txt file or NOINDEX tag to exclude Google from indexing its news stories, AFP has put the onus on Google to remove the AFP stories using Google resources and technology. While this kind of nationalism is sure to be a hit in France, the repercussions for AFP in the long run may do more harm than good.
Since Google is the world’s largest search engine, most online companies profit by being listed in Google. Being de-listed by Google generally can have very ominous and detrimental results for a company’s bottom line. Since AFP is choosing a rather dramatic way to opt-out of Google, this will have some immediate impact on their bottom line. Of course in the short term, AFP will most likely make up with this with the publicity that the lawsuit has brought them.
In the long run though, this will most likely turn out to be a very bad move for AFP. Not only will they not be getting search engine traffic from the world’s largest search engine, but also, their competition will getting this traffic. In fact, AFP’s competitors are most likely salivating at this prospect right now. When a competitor storms off in a huff and leaves an open space for the rest of the competition, one can bet that other French press agencies are already huddled in the boardroom scheming how best to take advantage of this situation.
Six months from now it will be interesting to see how this French flogging has paid off for AFP, or whether Agence France Presse will now have taken to simply flogging themselves.
