©ollectanea

In a story in Paris' Le Monde, Le Monde.fr : Accord de partenariat entre l'AFP et Google, the French daily reports that Google and the French news agency that sued Google in March 2005 for copyright infringement have settled their differences, and the suit has been dismissed. Unfortunately, the story reports that the terms of the settlement are secret (surprise!). It doesn't offer a lot of details, but it does suggest that Google will gain broader access to the Agency's holdings than it had under its claim of fair use (headlines, images, maybe a short blurb). This would be consistent with the kinds of deals that Google has negotiated with copyright holders in the US in connection with Google Book Search, where it claims a basic access under fair use to digitize in order to represent a work in its index and to show snippets, but negotiates with copyright owners for rights to provide broader access to content. I looked for confirmation of this story in English-speaking venues but have not seen it yet.