AFP sues Google for publishing copyrighted content

The Agence France Presse (AFP) is suing Google Inc because some of their articles (including photos) are published on Google News without AFP’s permission. The French news agency wants to get as much as $17.5 million in damages and filed the suite in the US District court for the District of Columbia. It’s not clear to me if AFP is doing a smart move by wanting Google to stop publishing their stories. After this give them a lot of exposure that they would probably not get otherwise. Associated (AP) or Reuters don’t seem to mind, and I think that I have seen stories from both news agencies on Google News. Also, one would think that AFP should have noticed that this was going on for a long time, so why make so much noise all the sudden. There are many ways to block the Google News bot from scanning their sites. If AFP doesn’t want to be scanned by Google, that’s their problem (and I think that it’s a mistake), but one would think that there are easier ways than this.