You’re probably wondering what the mighty, yet new Google news has in common with the mighty veteran AFP (Agence France Presse), and the embryonic Wikinews.
Wikinews is starting to gain some momentum. At first, the news there was a late, and sometimes poorly-written, version of the mainstream news. But things are starting to pick up. They had their first scoop (at least according to a blog entitled The Longest Now: immaterial torrentiality), and I’m starting to see news there before I come across it elsewhere.
But, this is not about comparing Wikinews with either Google news or AFP. Rather, it’s about the lawsuit brought against Google by AFP. Google has often been sued, but this time it’s one of the biggies, the oldest news agency in the world, AFP.
Google news scrapes news from other news sites, puts a headline and blurb on its site, and then links through to the source. The US Federal court ruled in 2002 that web sites can use thumbnails and 30 to 40 words of text if the content is linked to the source. However, AFP has explicitly asked Google to refrain from this.
I’ve heard mention before that this very issue is why Google News, even though exceptionally popular, is still free of advertising, and still in Beta. The news agencies, who invest a fortune in generating the content, were never going to happily sit back and let Google be the first port of call. This will be an interesting case to follow. Bloggers deep link all the time, and it will be interesting to see what precedent is set.
Not their /first/ scoop, but a scoop. And this ‘scoop’ was still picked up from another announcement somewhere online; just before it made it to any other news source. The first *real* scoop was back in January, when Wikinews broke a story on civil unrest in Belize, augmented by photos taken by a contributor who lived near the site of the protests.
But getting general news stories a bit before the main blogs and newswires — or covering stories noone else cares to cover, like the release of OpenOffice in Swahili, is becoming more common.
–SJ