Google News Still Indexing AFP; May Boost Court Case

Even as AP has some sort of a deal with Google News, the bad-blood with AFP still continues: in spite of the lawsuit by AFP against Google to remove AFP news from the Google News service, AFP content still shows up regularly in Google News results – from its channel partners, primarily, but in some instances from AFP’s own site, as John mentions here.
Google said back in March that it will drop AFP from its news index, even as AFP said it would still pursue the case.
But, as John says, “It’s probably fair to chalk up most of Google’s crawls of AFP’s own site as flaws in its algorithms that need to be tuned, which leaves AFP’ s syndicated product the proud beneficiary of free advertising via Google News.”
Following up on this, another story by IDG: Joshua J. Kaufman, an attorney with Venable LLP in Washington, D.C. who is representing AFP, said that if AFP prevails in the pending lawsuit, the scope of infringement will be much wider than originally alleged. “AFP was unaware of Google’s continued infringement but will of course seek damages for any infringements when the damage stage of the case comes before the court,” Kaufman said.

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