Association of American Publishers

The Association of Newspapers in Brazil is not happy with Google News, as it recently opted out of the free news aggregator, over complaints that Google crops news headlines and lede paragraphs for the decade-old service without permission nor monetary reimbursement.

The 154-member ANJ roughly equals 90 percent of Brazil’s newspaper circulation. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported on a dispute that occurred earlier this week between an ANJ member’s lawyer and a Google executive at the American Press Association General Assembly in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The contention apparently “fueled one of the most intense debates during the Inter American Press Association’s 68th General Assembly.”

According to the Knight Center:

On one side of the debate were defenders of news companies’ authoring rights like German attorney Felix Stang, who said, “platforms like Google’s compete directly with newspapers and magazines because they work like home pages and use content from them.”

On the other, Google representatives said their platform provides a way to make journalistic content available to more people. According to Marcel Leonardi, the company’s public policies director, Google News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world.

ANJ president Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto specifically told the Knight Center that providing the “first few lines of our stories to internet users, (Google) reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites.”

Google Public Policy Director Marcel Leonardi refuted Neto’s comment during the IAPA debate, claiming if the reader is “satisfied with the small blurb (we offer), that means the story did not call his attention that much.”

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Google and the Association of American Publishers just announced a settlement agreement for a 7-year-old litigation that will further provide access to copyrighted content digitized by Google for its Library Project.

Google started to scan and digitize library books in 2002 for its Book Search service founded in 2004 that allows users to download public domain books and snippets of copyrighted books. The Association of American Publishers filed a lawsuit against Google in 2005 for copyright infringement over the unauthorized snippets.

The Association sought an injunctive relief, but Google maintained the scanned book snippets were fair use. Both parties reportedly began negotiations to settle in 2006. However, in 2011, a supervising judge ruled to reject a major settlement proposal between them. Any news about close talks has since been quiet until today’s announcement about a finalized agreement.

The finalized agreement effectively ends the 2005 copyright infringement lawsuit; and the settlement is between the parties, so the court does not have to approve terms. The publisher plaintiffs include McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons, and Simon & Schuster. Although the companies’ statement does not reveal whether Google infringed, they said the settlement “acknowledged the rights and interests of copyright-holders.”

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According to a post on Google’s European Public Policy Blog, the company is forging groundbreaking partnerships with French publishers that it believes “will put France ahead of the rest of the world in bringing long lost out-of-print works back to life.” The agreements, Google claimed, will put an end to roughly six years of legal disputes with several publishers and authors in the country. The deals will also allow Google to continue ahead in its goal to bring the almost 75 percent of books that are currently out of print and unavailable to most. The result is publishers working with Google to “promote and commercialize” scanned copies of out-of-print works:

 

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