Google confirmed yesterday that the company is paying the Associated Press (AP) for its content and that content will be used as the foundation for a new product that will complement Google News.Google confirmed yesterday that the company is paying the Associated Press (AP) for its content and that content will be used as the foundation for a new product that will complement Google News.
According to the AP, the deal, which has been in place for months, helps Google avoid further dispute with the non-profit AP, which argued that Google's news search service, Google News, unjustly used the AP's words and photographs.
Google has long argued that providing pointers to news is a practice covered by fair use copyright protections.
Neither companies disclosed terms of the deal,
according to the AP. Google did not immediately return requests for comment about its new news product.
Google News is Google's
4th most popular product, according to data from Hitwise, garnering 1.38 percent of all traffic to Google.
Google News is unpopular among many publishers, who say that Google's computer-based news search
undermines the editorial process and takes traffic away from news sites.
The AP is a 158-year-old not-for-profit service owned by U.S. news companies. Unlike news agencies such as Reuters, the AP does not publish its content on a central Web site and thus does not benefit from traffic driven by Google News.
The AP has lately been trying to modernize its Internet operations. In March it released its
online video network, a video news service that allows individual site owners to publish AP videos to their sites.
Google is currently being sued by another news wire service, Agent France Presse, which is seeking $17.5 million in damages for copyright infringement. That case, being argued in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., continues in November.
This article originally appeared on Steve Bryant's blog, GoogleWatch.
