Agence France Presse has sued Google Inc., alleging the Web search leader includes AFP's photos, news headlines and stories on its news site without permission.
The French news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads, according to the suit filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“We are reviewing it,” Google spokesman Steve Langdon said of the AFP lawsuit. The attorney for AFP was not immediately available for comment.
AFP sells subscriptions to its content and does not provide it free. Google News gathers photos and news stories from around the Web and posts them on its news site, which is free to users.
“Without AFP’s authorization, defendant is continuously and willfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP’s photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News web pages,” AFP charged in its lawsuit.
AFP said it has informed Google that it is not authorized to use AFP’s copyrighted material as it does and has asked Google to cease and desist from infringing its copyrighted work.
AFP alleged that Google has ignored such requests and as of the filing date of the lawsuit “continues in an unabated manner to violate AFP’s copyrights.”
The lawsuit comes a few months after Perfect 10, a publisher of nude photographs, sued Google in federal court in Los Angeles.
In that lawsuit, Perfect 10 charged that Google illegally allowed people to view hijacked versions of photos it owns and produced, violating copyrights and harming its ability to profit from the distribution of the photos via its magazine and Web site.
“I’m very happy that other people who are ‘more respectable’ than myself are suing,” Norm Zada, president of Beverly Hills, California-based Perfect 10, told Reuters.
Zada added that other Web search providers display illegally obtained versions of copyrighted photos.
In 2002, a federal appeals court ruled that Web sites may reproduce and post “thumbnail” or down-sized versions of copyrighted photographs. But the court said displaying full-sized copies of photographs is a copyright violation.
