First, it was the French flap over Google putting great books of the world (including French) online, then it was the French AdSense publishers threatening to boycott Google, and now Agence France Presse (AFP) is suing Google for indexing their news pages. This Rabbit Redux copyright lawsuit means AFP wants Google to stop showing snippets of their news stories, including photos in the Google News search results.
Since AFP uses a subscription-only business model, they have a financial vested interest in where their stories appear on the Internet. The question is, however, does showing a headline and 60-word snippet of their stories which link back to their website erode or enhance their bottom line? Apparently, AFP thinks that Google has eroded their bottom line to the tune of $17.5 million which, is the amount of the lawsuit.
Even though AFP is subscription-only, not all of their content is locked into password-protected pages. A trip to their homepage will reveal top news stories on the right panel, that when clicked will open up a new browser window and display the entire news story. The same is true for photos on the front page as well.
Has AFP taken the easiest method to disallow the search engines from indexing these pages? The answer is no. When taking a peak at the AFP robots.txt file below, one can see that none of the search engine robots have been disallowed. Isn’t adding one short line to the robots.txt file a little easier than plunging forth with a $17.5 million lawsuit?
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /beta
Disallow: /francais/news
Disallow: /english/news
Disallow: /espanol/news
Disallow: /arabic/news
Perhaps AFP isn’t concerned about Google indexing these pages and are more concerning with the indexing of the subscription pages. Since Google cannot get to these pages on the AFP site it is picking them up from other sites which do have an AFP subscription and have not taken measures to disallow Google from indexing them. A simple NOINDEX tag on these pages would do the trick, which AFP could require from its subscribers.
This may not even be the point, though, since under the “fair use” laws, using a title and 60-words of text will most likely not be seen as infringing in the U. S. courts which is where the lawsuit was filed. One has to wonder why the lawsuit was filed in the U. S. where these laws apply and not in the French courts where there is not as much lenience on using snippets from others copyrighted materials.
So, what is this lawsuit really about? Could it be about control, territory, pride, domination, keeping foreign influence at bay? Or is it really about the money? If it is all about the money, then it will be interesting to see how AFP fairs when Google excludes them and AFP’s competitors start riding high on the Google Gravy Train. Perhaps AFP doesn’t care, though. And perhaps this is what its all about.
