Last year, I wrote a few articles about the court battles Google was facing from French company Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press. I also featured two guest articles from Bob Hoffman, an AFP partner site that was facing some serious trouble as a result of the lawsuit. This time around, it's the Paris based World Association of Newspapers that's looking for a fight.

USA Today ran a story today that talks about how newspaper publishers are up in arms over Google's continued practice of aggregating news content by pulling snippets of text, links and images to use in their Google News search results.

Websites like Google and its specialized Google News service automatically pull in headlines, photos and short excerpts of articles from thousands of news sources, linking back to the publishers' own site. Google News does not currently carry advertising.

"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article — it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."

Stories like these continue to amaze me. Why companies would be upset at the prospect of someone sending more visitors to their site is beyond me. Now, if Google was pulling the full text of an article and republishing it, I could see their point. Instead, these newspapers are getting the equivalent of free advertising...free targeted advertising...and they're complaining about it. Sounds to me like an industry that's so busy pointing fingers to explain why their trade is dying, that they're missing the fact that every time they point a finger at Google, they are pointing three more back at themselves.