Google news service (news.google.com) has been sued by Agence France-Presse for at least $17.5 million dollars.

AFP claims that Google has continuously been reproducing and displaying their photographs, headlines and story leads on its pages without AFP's agreement. Thus Google is violating AFP's copyrights. And even though the company has requested Google to stop using its copyrighted work, Google continues to violate AFP's copyrights.

The Cheers magazine feels that AFP shouldn't have any problems with Google using its content as Google basically just links back to AFP, thus generating only more revenue for AFP. We feel that only the usage of pictures might be questionable as sometimes these pictures might be used for illustrating a story by another publication (written on the same topic). However headlines and summaries only attract more readers to AFP.