As I was looking through my bloglines I discovered an article that caught my eye in John Battelle's Searchblog. The article is titled Google and AFP Settle Dispute. I was attracted to this article because at first it reminded me of the article we talked about in class. This article was the one where Viacom, who owns MTV and Comedy Central, sued Google for "massive intentional copyright infringement" on its YouTube. The article or a similar article on the Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit can be found here. Google ended up making some changes in order to stop users from adding Viacom material to YouTube. They avoided totally erasing the Viacom clips by telling Viacom that they are responsible for alerting Google when they see their material on YouTube. This is sort of an impossible task for Viacom, so in my mind Google kind of got away with what they did.
In John Battelle's Searchblog article he discusses another lawsuit against Google, but this time they have even defended a company in a different country. The Agence France-Presse (AFP)is a global news agency headed by Pierre Louette. This Paris based company has also sued Google In March 2005 for copyright infringement. This dispute does not concern Google's YouTube, but it concerns Google's GoogleNews. The AFP argues that GoogleNews was publishing news summaries with headlines and photos from AFP journalists without the permission of the AFP. The argument settled and the "deal will allow Google to use headlines and photos on Google News and other services that drive online traffic to sites displaying AFP news." They did not disclose the financial outcomes of this deal, but from such a large company as Google, I am sure that AFP received its fair share. The article also mentions a separate lawsuit with The Associated Press from August 2006. This dispute also end with Google agreeing to pay the AP for its headlines and photos.
After reading about all these lawsuits I think that Google should be a little more careful about how it deals with other companies. At the time Google probably knew that what they were doing was violating copyrights, but they were probably going to continue its practices until the other companies found out or spoke up. This does not seem ethical at all. I am not saying that that is what Google was doing, but after seeing just three of probably many more lawsuits of the same issue, copyright infringement, I feel that Google was well aware and could have made more changes concerning this after its first lawsuit of this type. What I find funny about this situation is that John Battelle's Searchblog links his readers to an article that covers this lawsuit found in Yahoo News with the headline Agence France-Presse, Google Settle Suit. I am sure that Yahoo jumps on the chance to publish any downfalls of its' competitor. From all the lawsuits I found involving Google, Yahoo has many opportunities to point out Google's flaws.
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2 comments:
After reading the article and your post I started to think about all these lawsuits that google has. Yes google needs to be careful as to how they deal with other companies, but other companies need to be careful about how they deal with google. google is obviously one of the most well known search engines (plus all of their other services they offer) and to be associated with them should be beneficial to any company. I would think that AFP would be happy that when people go to google for news their articles come up. This is free publicity for AFP that draws random news searchers to their articles. the thing that google should focus on here is they should make sure that they provide appropriate links to the original articles from AFP to avoid any further copyright infingement.
Good point! Google is a great company that other companies should be excited to be featured on. Normally I do not think that the lawsuits are simply about being connected with Google, but the fact that they are not getting reimbursed for their material being on Google. Except for non-profit organizations, companies have one goal: to make a profit. If Google continues using other companies' material without compensating them, then that is not fair for the smaller companies to not profit and for Google to profit for something it did not write. You are also correct in that Google should do a better job in directing its users to the official sites in which it got its information from in order to give credit where credit is due. All in all, I think that Google is well aware of what it is doing and can easily redirect users to the original articles and their websites. Now Google just has to carry out that practice.
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