The World Association on Newspapers, based in Paris, has launched a lobbying campaign against the usage of their content by news aggregators like Google news. Recently, Google News came out of Beta versions. It indexes around 5000 news sources.
Earlier, news agency AFP had also warned Google new against using its content. It has a case against Google pending in the U.S. courts.
As Ali Rahnema, managing director of the Association, said in an interview,
“The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article — it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.”
On its part, Google has entered into partnerships with some newspapers - it is serving ads to the New York Times website and also sells classified ads for the print edition of the Chicago Sun-Times in a pilot project. One point going for Google may be that Google News carries no advertising and is free.
