IndustryJudge Gives AFP Case Against Google More Time

Judge Gives AFP Case Against Google More Time

A US federal judge has declined to dismiss a copyright infringement case
filed by Agence France Press against Google
News. Instead, she’s given both sides more time to assemble evidence before
ruling on a dismissal motion.

Judge: Google News
lawsuit can proceed
from News.com has the rundown. Part of the problem seems
to be that the neither AFP nor Google can easily reconstruct Google News pages
from 2003 and 2004.

You’d think that if AFP was going to file a copyright infringement case,
they’d have recorded exactly this type of evidence to present. But having been
involved in a few cases as an expert witness, it doesn’t surprise me that the
plaintiff has made accusations without saving the key evidence. Note to those
planning to sue over some search-related case — save HTML pages and
screenshots!

AFP says that Google News unlawfully incorporated headlines, photographs and
story summaries. Google argues they haven’t and that AFP has yet to identify
specific infringements over the past year since the case was
filed.

AFP Content
Still In Google News, Probably Via AFP’s Own Partners
from me earlier this
week covers how some AFP content still shows in Google via AFP partners, despite
Google saying
last year it would drop AFP.

Continued
Google News indexing ‘boosts AFP case’
from IDG is a follow-up with the AFP
lawyers saying this may hurt Google further. We’ll see. It could well hurt AFP,
if Google argues that AFP itself has failed to instruct its partners on how to
keep AFP content out of search engines.

Over at ResourceShelf, scroll down in this

post
, and Gary Price has listed a variety of legal documents in the case.
This is a key
one that indicates the absurdity of the AFP claim. They’ve filed a copyright
infringement claim, but the document shows how they are depending on Google to
go back and give them the evidence to back the claim, via archived Google News
papers and photographs. In contrast, this is exactly the type of evidence you’d
assume AFP already had assembled prior to filing a claim.

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