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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."

4 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 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'!"
    3. Re:Yeah, that's fine. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      This was hard, wasn't it?