News agency AFP is suing Google for nearly £10m, claiming the search engine breached its copyright by reproducing its pictures and articles.

The French news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5m and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads.

"Without AFP's authorisation, [the] defendant is continuously and wilfully reproducing and publicly displaying AFP's photographs, headlines and story leads on its Google News web pages," AFP said in its lawsuit, filed in the US in the Columbia district court.

AFP said it had already asked the search engine to stop displaying the agency's copyrighted work on the Google News site, which aggregates stories from other sites.

It said Google had ignored such requests and "continues in an unabated manner to violate AFP's copyrights".

Google News, launched in autumn 2002, gathers photos and news stories from around the web and posts them on its news site, which is free for users to access.

AFP, one of the world's biggest news agencies, has 600 paying online clients and does not provide its articles or pictures for free on the web.

The lawsuit comes a few months after Perfect 10, a publisher of nude photographs, sued Google in the federal court in Los Angeles.

Perfect 10 said Google illegally allowed people to view hijacked versions of photos it owns and produced, violating copyrights and harming its ability to profit from the distribution of the photos via its magazine and website.

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