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German Law To Make Google Pay For Snippets

Posted by timothy on from the die-schnippets-sind-aber-teuer! dept.

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."

7 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, that's fine. by gcnaddict · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Who thought this was a good idea?

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    1. Re:Yeah, that's fine. by ichthus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      see robots.txt. Google honors mine.

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    2. Re:Yeah, that's fine. by Sir_Sri · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Yeah, that's fine. by dkf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

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      "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
    4. Re:Yeah, that's fine. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      This was hard, wasn't it?

    5. Re:Yeah, that's fine. by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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  2. Re:Nein nein nein by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

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