Associated Press Taking A Stand Against News Aggregators

The Associated Press and their subsidiaries will now begin taking legal action against websites that aggregate their content without permission. One of the clear aggregate suspects is Google News.

“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” stated William Dean Singleton, Chairman and CEO of MediaNews Group and a board of director on the AP. The AP will develop a system that will track articles online to see if they are being used legally.

The statement that was made by the AP did not specifically mention any of the companies that they are taking a stand against.

Google News shows the headlines and a couple of sentences of the article in the title, but anyone that wants to read the whole article has to click through the website. Google has argued that this limited use does not require permission.

The AP itself has an agreement with Google for their content to appear on Google News, but many other newspaper companies do not. This action is more of a “newspaper industry initiative” that is being led by the AP. Over 1,400 United States member newspaper owns the AP collectively.

The AP has about 4,100 employees and made about $710 million in revenue in 2007. In late February, Google started placing advertisements on their News website.

[via NYT]

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