Google detects Duplicated Stories to benefit Original Creators

Google is preparing to eat into the profits of newspapers as it announced a redesign of its news site, which would not show duplicated newswire stories on its page. It announced a program to carry full articles of four major international news agencies on Google news pages instead of its current practice of putting only the headline and few bits of text and then sending readers to publishers' sites for the full story.

This could seriously affect the publishers who charge online advertisers according to the traffic they get on their sites, which is mostly through Google.

Google will scrutinize the news stories published by the Press Association, Associated Press, Canadian Press and Agence France-Presse and prevent any of their duplicated versions to appear in its search results.

The four agencies will help the web giant in its endeavor, by helping to detect which sites are running wire copy and eliminate them from the search results.

According to Google its new feature, called ‘duplicate detection,’ “not only enhances the experience for users, [but] also gives proper recognition to journalists and publishers who work hard to break the news.”

Agence France Presse (AFP), one of the world's largest wire services, accused Google of copyright infringement on the News site and filed a law suit against it. It is also believed that the Associated Press threatened to file a similar lawsuit.

Google insists that the process of having hyperlinked headlines, text snippets and thumbnail images from news sources on its pages is protected by the fair use principle.

However, it reached a settlement with AFP and signed a licensing agreement with it, as well as with AP.

“Our primary goal is always to provide as many different perspectives as possible on any given story, so we trawl the world for those multiple perspectives from different publishers nationally and internationally,” said Josh Cohen, Google News business product manager. “But from a user perspective, it's not offering a different perspective as three of the five sources are duplicate stories.”

Google asserts that its new move will benefit those who originally create content. If publishers put in their own quotes and information to the agency copy, their version of the story will appear next to the first agency version.

However, Google said, the deal with news agencies would not have their stories appear higher in search results. Users would be able to link to duplicate versions carried on other publishers' sites said Mr. Cohen, adding, “This is not a blanket block on news agency content on newspapers' sites.”

Talking about the waning of fair-use protection claim while publishing full articles, Cohen said, “We respect copyright laws. When we go beyond fair use, we enter into licensing agreements.” The ‘duplicate detection’ feature is already operational on the site, he said.