by Bob Hoffman - Political Gateway.com

All internet eyes will be on the court case of AFP and Google. The outcome could spell doom for search engines and blogs as we know them and end news syndication online. Possibly enabling a select few to control all our online news.

AFP’s lawsuit states Google is taking headlines and summaries of news articles from AFP clients websites. Something AFP clients could not be more happy about. AFP says this is copyright infringement.

This same type of headline news ‘grabbing’ is done by a large number of companies around the globe. If you ever read the Drudge report you may realize it will affect even him, for he ‘changes’ the headline which is a copyright violation.

AFP wants Google to pay them upwards of 17 million in damages and start only using the headlines and a ‘disclaimer’ with an AFP copyright. As ridiculous as it sounds, it is the truth.

Google in response has dropped many AFP news sites already and may eventually drop them all. The financial damage to the clients of AFP is unknown but may be severe as Google is the number one search engine in the world.

How does this affect bloggers and search engines?

A common search result includes the title of the page and a group of text showcasing the searched for term. As the title of a news item page is usually the headline, and the text surrounding the searched for term is usually part of the story, you can see how this would mean the search engines cannot cache or use in their results any AFP news items.

Bloggers traditionally quote articles and link to them in much the same way Google’s News site does. This means they can no longer do that with AFP news items without threat of a lawsuit.

Once AFP wins, other news organizations will follow until search engines will no longer have any relevant data relating to current events, except blogs who can no longer link or quote the articles relating to current events.

When the bloggers are shut out of the news stream (and maybe that is what this is about) and independent news sites are blacklisted from search engines, where will people go to get news? Only the big players. And they will completely control the news we see, read, and hear.

This site, Political Gateway, is one of those independent news sites. We are scared.

And since we host AFP content, our news is no longer syndicated, so if you read this it will be on some other blog or news site as ours cannot be found with a search on a news aggregator anymore.

Permission is granted to quote, copy, modify, or otherwise disseminate this article online or in print by anyone without written consent. Except ABC, CBS, NBC, AFP, AP, Reuters, UPI, and any other news organization that is a known content provider. Those mentioned above must ask for permission. Turnabout is fair play after all.

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