Google has inked an agreement with top news company associated press which grants google the permission to use its wire service's materials.

Google has been using news snippets from different news sources for its news.google.com portal. There's one global wire service, Agency France Presse which is suing Google for using its material in Google News Search.

Agence France says it is a copyright violation while Google says its use of snippets and thumbnails is protected by the fair-use principle and that copyright law doesn't protect headlines, text snippets and thumbnail images.

I guess that's the reason why Google is doing this deal with Associated Press. I believe that Google has not violated copyright as indeed, the usage of small news snippets and thumbnail version of images are "fair-use" of the copyrighted material.

Source: cio.com