Other cases regarding the legality of news aggregators have been filed but
were settled before going to trial. Agence France Presse (“AFP”), a Paris-based
wire service, sued Google News claiming that the headline, lead, and
accompanying photo displayed by Google News’ aggregator were protected
content even in an abbreviated form.259 AFP does not freely distribute news,
but instead requires parties to pay licensing fees to publish its exclusive
content on their own websites.260 Therefore, AFP argued that the headline,lead, and photo displayed by the news aggregators were licensed content and
fell outside the fair use exception. The AFP case, however, settled before trial
after Google entered into a licensing deal with the AFP to post content.261
During these proceedings, Google also moved to stop another potential suit
from the Associated Press, another wire service, by entering into a similar
licensing agreement.262 Despite these licensing agreements, Google maintains
that activities by its aggregator, Google News, were fully consistent with fair
use and that the agreements allow for new uses of AP and AFP news
content.263