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German Government Wants Google To Pay For the Right To Link To News Sites
First time accepted submitter presroi writes "Al Jazeera is reporting on the current state of plans by the German government to amend the national copyright law. The so-called 'Leistungsschutzrecht' (neighboring right) for publishers is introducing the right for press publishers to demand financial compensation if a company such as Google wants to link to their web site. Since the New York Times reported on this issue in March this year, two draft bills have been released by the Minister of Justice and have triggered strong criticism from the entire political spectrum in Germany, companies and activist bloggers.(Full disclosure: I am being quoted by Al Jazeera in this article)"
First of all: The so called "Leistungsschutzrecht" has already been cut back to become a "Lex Google", meaning it will (currently) only apply to Google, making it open to litigation (laws must not be tailored to one specific offender).
The whole thing is a farce. It's been a concerted effort of German media companies trying to bully others into paying compensation. Consequently, the initiators being media companies, you won't find much criticism in the media.
If you care to read some more about it, use google translate and go to:
http://www.stefan-niggemeier.de/blog/ein-kartell-nutzt-seine-macht-wie-die-verlage-fuer-das-leistungsschutzrecht-kaempfen
They already do. It's called robots.txt
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
This is one of the most incomprehensible post summaries I've ever seen on Slashdot; it could have used a little TLC in the way of explanation.
So basically the German publishers are claiming that the current copyright law be amended to make any quote from an article, even the headline, subject to a copyright licensing fee. Under current law, the headline and opening sentences of an article are in the public domain. Linking itself is free; it's the snippet quoting that Google and other sites like to do that would cost money. However, it would have disastrous consequences for blogging and online journalism as a whole, not to mention search engines, as pretty much any web page that quotes a German article would be liable to pay a fee.
Reading the second article, it would appear that the second draft of the bill has already gotten to the point of compromise where nobody would be happy with the eventual outcome, including the publishers, so it will most likely stall or be shelved permanently. At this point, it's almost more a bullet dodged than actual news. Kudos on posting an article in which you're quoted, though.
On a side note, the original German term seems much less ambiguous than the British English "neighboring rights" or American English "related rights". "Leistungsschutzrecht" literally means"right to protection of effort".
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
"Leistungsschutzrecht" has nothing to do with neighbours. The three words it is made off are Leistung which translates as "achievement, effort, performance", Schutz = "protection" and Recht = "right, law".
It plain and simple intends to protect the efforts of the newspapers. And it is highly controversial within Germany. Basically, our news and printing industry is what your movie and music industry are - strong lobby organisations buying special rights for themselves.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And the rest of the story is that after the companies complained that they only wanted to be removed from Google News, not Google Search, Google re-indexed them in Search but did not include them in News. Also, the companies in question began using the meta "noarchive" tag to instruct Google not to cache their pages, so there is no "Cached" link when you find them in search (caching had been a major part of their complaint and Google had previously pointed out to them that they could use "noarchive", but it apparently wasn't until they were removed from the index that they agreed to use it.)
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