Google

New York, NY: (May-21-07) Internet search engine Google is understood to have reached deals with several large UK news groups over carrying their content on Google News. Google is maintaining a high degree of confidentiality regarding its settlements for fear that it will end up having to pay for similar licenses with all of the 4500 news services it carries on its news aggregator. French news wire service Agence France-Presse filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google over stories taken from its site without Google paying for them. Google defended its stance by claiming that it was not in breach of copyright rules because it carries only the headline and the opening couple of sentences from each story in its service, pointing out that it was benefiting news groups by directing traffic to their websites. But, with organizations countering that consumers often just settled for news snippets and did not click through, Google lost a test case against the Belgian press in February 2007. It agreed to an out-of-court settlement with French news wire service Agence France-Presse, which had been pursuing the company with a $17.5 million (£8.9m) lawsuit. Google reached a similar settlement with rival news wire Associated Press in the US in 2006. [MEDIA CHANNEL: GOOGLE SETTLEMENT]

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Published on May-22-07