German Law To Make Google Pay For Snippets

judgecorp writes "The German government has announced plans for a copyright law which would require Google, other search engines, and aggregators to pay for small snippets of text displayed on their pages. Journalistic citations and private users will be exempt."

Comments

Yeah, that's fine.

[gcnaddict]

Google, Bing, et al. will just stop linking to sites which enforce this.

Who thought this was a good idea?

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[MarkvW]

This is a great idea. If a site wants to keep their material off Google, then they can. If they want their material to be on Google, they can do that too.

I fail to see the problem.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[ichthus]

see robots.txt. Google honors mine.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Sir_Sri]

Ya, if anything the market has shifted the opposite direction, and you pay them to get your website featured prominently (however you want to define that specifically).

Search engines have no incentive to pay to link. As long as they can minimally link for free they will, and if they have to pay for everything they link, well that isn't going to happen is it, because then you'd have no search.

It's like demanding the phone company pay businesses for the right to list their name in the phonebook.

A couple of weeks ago there was a story here about some campground in spain getting screwed because a search for Alfaques or whatever it was produced a slew of images from some terrible accident near them 30 years ago. That happens because the people who publish those images have made sure their results are at the top of searches, with images in thumbnails, and they are bigger companies than the small little campground. The system can't work both directions at once, and I can't imagine it working with search providers having to pay for what they are currently paid for.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[medcalf]

It requires needless software development. Instead of honoring robots.txt for sites that don't agree to be indexed, Google will either have to extend robots.txt to allow oppt in or alter their internal code with a list of what they will not index regardless of robots.txt. More cruft and potentially nonstandard extensions on the web is not a good thing. Or Google could just stop indexing any site with an IP addr in Germany.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Internetuser1248]

The German public cares a lot about privacy and security on the net. Germany also has copyright lobbies. They are trying to sneak this in as the former. As soon as the truth about it hits the media it will be ridiculed and dropped. Germany has a parliamentary system and it works ok (in comparison to some other systems I could name), a bill is being planned usually means a member bill and some of them are retarded, but they never come anywhere near becoming law.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Tharsman]

Honest question:
Can you configure robots.txt to allow Google to index your site for search results without summarizing your news in news.google.com?

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[dkf]

Which is pretty much an internet death sentence. Smart.

So? Google is not under an actual legal obligation to index or describe any site hosted in Germany (or anywhere else). The enormous majority of people outside Germany wouldn't care if their sites vanished from the face of the earth. The simplest technical response to such a law would therefore be for search engines to not return any matches at all for German sites (and to not provide any results at all to people in Germany). Very simple to implement. Complies with the law.

Also totally not what the legislator had in mind, but who cares about what passes for thought in his or her neck of the woods?

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Tharsman]

I think this not about search results, but news.google.com summarizing and aggregating news in a way that users don’t ever feel the need to enter news sites to see what is going on in the news today.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

This was hard, wasn't it?

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you didn't use Google's/Bing's news search much, because otherwise you'd know they show 2-3 sentence blurbs, barely enough to find relevant articles. Yahoo news search shows somewhat longer snippets, but still shorter than, say, an average /. summary and still not enough to visit only search page.

This is just yet another attempt at legislation from people unaware of how Internet works and proud of it.

Here's a beauty:

The law would oblige Internet aggregators and search engines to pay publishers to display all or part of their articles, including snippets such as headlines embedded in search links, according to the CDU.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[MightyMartian]

Don't worry... he's coming.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[MightyMartian]

Good, stupidity and greed deserve their just rewards. I predict a lawsuit in a year demanding that Google put snippets back up.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Dishevel]

Google is not required to do business in any single country.
Google can not be touched if it just pulls everything out of Germany then de lists all German sites and shuts down its .gr domain.
What are they going to do? Demand that Google do business in Germany?
Fuck em.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Rhodri Mawr]

Bloody Germans, shutting down Google in Greece. How low will they stoop? Is this another condition of the bail-out?


(the German TLD is .de BTW)

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Your.Master]

Leaving aside your assumption that Google can afford to do this more than Germany can (obviously both sides can, but I think Google would be the clear loser in pulling out of Germany), you're not answering the question that was asked.

The question was about Google refusing to service sites which insist that German law be enforced, implying that Google would still serve German sites that let them pass. I strongly suspect that would be illegal whether or not there's any antitrust concerns.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Dishevel]

I do not think it would hurt Google.
I think if Google stood up to this the law would get changed.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[dkf]

I wonder. If there was an issue with a specific company, AND if Google was declared a monopoly, would not listing that company count as anticompetitive?

I truly can't see how that matters. Any law would have to apply to all search engines equally anyway, so the only safe thing for any of them to do would be to refuse to index German sites or provide search results to people and businesses in Germany. OK, depending on the detail of the law it might be possible to be a little less draconian than that (e.g., it might be possible to provide snippets of non-.de sites) but any search engine would still be in the same position as Google with respect to German law (or the law would be deemed to be totally unfair, and thus get struck out by courts). Somehow I suspect that those who propose/desire this law do not believe that that's what would happen, but despite being the largest economy in Europe, they're still not that large that it is impossible for a search engine to not serve them and still be viable. Consequences are pretty clear: "we're not paying anyone for snippets that are in effect advertising for your site; whatever you try, we still won't pay you" will be the unanimous response. I also bet that the organizations who think they'd gain from this would blink before the search engines did. About the only single countries that are truly important are the US (though no single state) and China. Europe's about as important as the US in terms of market size, but isn't a single country. (What's more, German legislation is definitely not going to be enforced anywhere else. The whole idea of that makes me giggle a bit.) Search engines do not need the German traffic, and could swallow the hit of not operating there if necessary; whether or not they could afford to also take the hit on paying for snippets is beside the point: it's so totally in opposition to their business model that they won't.

Mind you, this just appears to be an idea that's being floated by a politician-crony of Big Content, and an unusually ill-considered one at that. If it withers on the vine (most likely outcome by far, IMO) then it's no big deal. Let's worry about things that might actually be enacted for real, not the wilder reaches of the improbable; you can always find someone who'll say something outrageous, but if it's just talk then that's all it is.

Nein nein nein

[koan]

Achtung!!! this is a bad idea, copyright law is out of hand.

Re:Nein nein nein

[gstoddart]

Achtung!!! this is a bad idea, copyright law is out of hand.

You know, I increasingly think that this be read aloud any time a government tries to pass a law about technology.

DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FUR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN!

If you don't know how it works, don't touch it. :-P

All link to english web site

[aepervius]

It is not that I don't trust you all guy, but I would rather read the german law than the (eventually biased) interpretation by some english blog/web site.

Re:All link to english web site

[imagined.by]

At this moment, it's just a proposal. A draft will most likely be presented in April. So it's not written in stone just yet.

Re:All link to english web site

[rolfwind]

The announcement doesn't surprise me at all. Germany is retarded with copyrights and riddled with the copyright industry lobbyists, they make auctions now give a percentage of art sales into a fund to be distributed to the artist who made it. This even affects art that was sold before the law. All it did was spring up masses of organizations that claim to represent a list of artists to claim the money and then take their commission.

Not to mention that the people who invested into art suddenly lost a few % to these leeches.

Before anyone claims that's right or correct, should volunteer, when selling their house, to give a few % to the carpenter/bricklayers/plumbers/electricians/etc. who built it, into perpetuity. Or when their used car is sold, give a few percent to the manufacturer. Or used books on amazon. Etc.

Re:All link to english web site

[WoOS]

An alas German article about the whole debate (including Pro and Contra position) can be found in the c't 17/10 (online http://heise.de/-1447608). They also have a news article on the most recent development ( http://heise.de/-1447608 ) but that is not really anything new except that the government now started to make internal plans on how to realize such a law. Note that obviously Heise would profit from such a law but they are typically quite impartial.

Main argument for introducing the law is that for many news simply quoting headlines and a few excerpted lines of text is all someone wants to know. Thus the argument goes that the news aggregators do not direct (sufficient) traffic to the authors of the news but mostly keep the traffic - and thus the ad profits - for themselves.

This should turn out good

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see Google just stop displaying snippets, and see how long it takes for them to realize that no one can find their articles anymore

Re:This should turn out good

[cpghost]

Wasn't it exactly what happened in Belgium?

Legislating the Interwebs?

[clafarge]

This is what happens when any nation takes it upon themselves to try to legislate the internet: mindnumbingly stupid legislation. We edge closer to this trap each day ourselves.

Re:Does that include Slashdot, then?

[asylumx]

Ok, I actually asked three questions...

Re:again?

[next_ghost]

No and no.

Re:And Google pulls out of Germany

[maxwell demon]

While I've heard several times equating the web with the internet, his is the first time I've come across someone equating search engines with the internet.