Google sued over news aggregation

REUTERS SAID Agence France Presse (AFP) is taking legal action over the aggregation of news and pictures on the Google News site.

Google News uses technology to aggregate headlines and part of the first paragraph of news stories, and also sometimes uses pictures linked to the headlines.

But AFP is a news gathering service which syndicates its content to different publications for a subscription, and, according to the Reuters report, here, has filed a case in a California court seeking damages of $17.5 million.

AFP also wants an injunction to prevent Google (ticker: GOOG) from using its headlines, snaps and elements from the first paragraph of its news feeds.

The case will have implications for other sites which aggregate news in a similar way to Google. If news sites provide XML feeds, the situation is somewhat different.

Google News is still in beta. µ

L'INQS
AFP
Google News