Slashdot Mirror
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)"
If Google have to pay to index their sites, the news sites are the ones missing out. Unless Google are force to index them and also forced to pay, but that would in essence be a tax against a single company.
HTTP/1.1 400
the new conservative-liberal German Government that was elected in late 2009 declared: “Press Publishers shall not be discriminated against other disseminators of copyright protected works [e.g. film or music producers]. Therefore we aim for the introduction of a neighbouring right for press publishers to increase the protection of press publications on the Internet.”
First... a weird thing: are the press publishers in the same league as the copyright protected works? I know that an US court allowed FauxNews the right to serve "creative fiction" as news, but I thought this should be rather an exception than the norm.
Second... now, I know that's a fool hope, but I cannot stop myself wishing that the discrimination (... which is a wrong thing, right?...) would have been resolved by lowering the rights of the film or music producers instead of increasing the rights of the news publishers.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
this doesnt seem like a good solution for the ailing news sites. murdoch has been beating this drum for a while in the US, and nobody is listening.
however, the sites producing content are not getting compensation for doing so, is this just a paradigm shift, or can something be done to protect some of their revenue?
The proposed law has nothing to do with linking to news site at all. The point is that the publishers are to be compensated if anyone takes parts of the article or the full text and displays them somewhere else. There is not even so much debate about the intention itself, I think it's only fair if you reprint significant parts of an article (and thereby deprive the original author of advertisement revenue or subscription fees), but what constitues a "significant part" of a news article? For example Google News usually shows the first few sentences under the link, is that a significant part? In my opinion it's not, but that is what the discussion is about.
In the original draft, even single sentences would have been regarded as "significant parts", but that would then also mean that you cannot quote from any news article anymore in any other publication, which would have significant negative side effects. So, what happens now is what happens in every democracy, someone drafts a bill, other people critisize it, and we have no clue yet what is going to happen in the end.
Is it too much to ask that you know what the fuck you're talking about before drafting or considering a piece of legislation that affects said fucking whatever?
Those previews are like movie trailers. If you can't get interested by the movie trailers, no one will get you to watch the movie then, protecting revenue be pissed.
The case roots somewhat deeper. The Perlentaucher ("pearl diver") site was compiling links to interesting articles and providing excerpts from them, and got sued for copyright infringment because the excerpts were too verbose for some of the original publishers. Perlentaucher prevailed, the courts found the excerpts to be within the "quoting" limits. So now the publishers want to get compensated for those excerpts, especially if they are automatically generated like Google's link results.
They could produce articles that are worth reading and thus get ad revenue when people go to read the full article. Or they can continue reporting whatever policy Murdoch wants to push that day.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
There is robots.txt
You don't want Google to link to you, update your robots.txt. It is so simple ?! Those that do will be indexed, those that don't wont and it is business as usual or lack there off.
Google removes those sites from their results, removed page sues because of anti-trust unfair competition.
It's not about beeing indexed or not. it's about getting money from Google cause Google has money. And with all that money lying around, there has to be a way to get some of it.
bickerdyke
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
did it once... in Belgium... de-listed companies that won a lawsuit (gave them what the court ordered) and they went screaming to the courts that Google was being evil...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Nope. News, unlike e.g. investigative journalism, are mostly fungible commodities.
Dilbert RSS feed
This time it's the news publishers who want to squeeze money from google, not an entity that would profit if that money dripped out as tax money.
In related news: banning those tricks isn't possible. They will stay possible as long as long as the involved countries profit from that too. With those tricks in place, those companies lieave little tax money in Ireland and the Netherlands. Without that, they would pay big tax money to some other country and none at all to Ireland and Netherlands.
So there is no incentive to change those policies.
bickerdyke
Murdoch pushes policy in Germany?
Yes. Sky Deutschland is owned by Murdoch and pushes Murdochs policy. (Germany's largest pay TV provider according to wikipedia.)
Oh, you must be one of those people who read an article and instantly forget that there are other places in the world outside of your context
And you must be one of those people who criticise other people without having a clue of things outside of your context.
There is plenty of stuff that are not working in EU as they do in the US, however /. is a US centric site and therefore focus on the not working part of the US and what is better outside. EU centric sites do the opposite.
Try to think for yourself. If you just want the warm feeling that the US is the best place in the world and nobody else does anything better, just open the TV news channel lined up with you existing opinion and shut down your critical thinking.
And that's why the whole thing is stupid. Any news site that chooses to charge just won't get indexed. If they want that result, they can already get it with robots.txt without wasting time and money creating a law.
Murdoch pushes policy in Germany?
Yes. Sky Deutschland is owned by Murdoch and pushes Murdochs policy. (Germany's largest pay TV provider according to wikipedia.)
That's true.
But your missing one relevant point: Pay TV doesn't mean shit in Germany.
Murdoch can influence more or less nothing here.
But we have or own 'Murdochs': The Axel Springer AG is News Corp. in German.
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
The latest draft amendment proposes far less than what some German publishers sought from the beginning. Throughout the last three years that a neighbouring right has been under consideration in public hearings, the publishers have insisted that the use of its material for any commercial gain - both in the online and offline spheres - should be reflected with some recompense to them. "The example that was given at the hearing was: a bank employee reads his morning newspaper online and sees something about the steel industry, and then advises his clients to invest in certain markets," says Mathias Schindler of Wikimedia Deutschland, who has attended the hearings. "The publishers argued that the bank consultant was only able to advise his clients because of the journalistic work in the published article. So that means the publisher deserves a fair share of any money made from that scenario. This was the proposal from the start."
Normally, slashdot readers are all for opt-in as compared to opt-out. Why is it different here?
They can ask Google to not index them.
If only we had some way of doing that automatically per site?
I propose a file named "robots.txt" file to be placed in a http server's root,
in which is some parsable description that describes what web crawlers are and aren't allowed to access.
It's not like we have anything like this right now... right?
This is a non-issue.
"Fair enough. We won't link to these sites."
Next government idiocy to deal with?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Yet still they try, which is why the GP is correct. Instead of focusing on the bullshit celebrity news and presenting an old man's bladder infection as worthy of "breaking news", perhaps the journalists should start thinking about presenting relevant facts in a neutral tone and allowing readers to form their own opinion. You know, like real journalists.
A.I. Research. The peculiar science in which we know the question and we know the answer, but can't show the working
That's all I have to say.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Why should they vote in favour? The result would be those big companys paying their taxes in the US or Cayman Islands - not much to win for those 25. They'd rather had to stand in for the additional debts Ireland has to make to compensate for that "little" money Google left there as tax...
bickerdyke
Google needs to delist ALL German websites Let's see the German internet economy collapse overnight.
I'm thinking that their government is made up of idiots and morons that have no clue how anything really works.
Although we do have a senator that thinks women secrete something when they get raped to prevent pregnancy, so we have our share of complete idiots as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The news purveyors are complaiining that a summary of the article is being presented. People only read the summary and don't click to see the whole article. Ad revenue due to the news purveyor is lost.
This seems similar to the original arguments against selling music by the track instead of the entire CD. The "old model" was that the purchase package was a full CD (with a few good songs and a lot of dogs). This parallels showing a whole page (with a few interesting paragraphs and a lot of filler. The content owners wanted to sell the whole package, not just the highlights.
The new model is letting the listener hear a short clip (the paragraph on the aggregator's page), and then buying an entire song (viewing the whole article on the host page) if interested. Selling a whole CD (buying the magazine/newspaper or hopping to linked articles at the host's site) may be done if there's sufficient "good" content. And once on the host site, the viewer may well view more than the one article.
This seems to work well for the music industry. Yes, the model has changed. Yes, they have adapted. The print world needs to examine this model, use it, adapt.
Everyone tries really really hard to be #1 to be linked by Google and other sites, these guys are ass-backward if they think people should actually pay THEM to put what's essentially free ads on their page. If I were Google, I would completely remove all links the sites that don't want to be linked, and let them die in the abyssal depths of Internet oblivion where nobody knows they exist. What a bunch of retards.
That doesn't necessarily stop Google. They could still list the sites as required by the courts, just give them a weight of .00000001, meaning they're on the last page(except for very specific searches), and only listed as a link, no text, so very few people would click on them anyways.
I don't read AC A human right
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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That is so typical of content-"producers" or copyright-holders of the "We want to eat our cake and have it, too" syndrome. They want the extra traffic generated from the news-aggrigators and search engines, but what also a share of the money the news-aggrigators and search engines are generating by offering an useful service.
If they do not want that the news-aggrigators and search engines are using their content, they could just use the robot.txt file to opt-out of the indexing. But of course then they do not get the extra traffic. So they choose the next "logical" step: get the benefit from the news-aggrigators and search engines but complain loudly and weeping so they get an extra piece from the money.
The inter-trade organizations VDZ and BDZV could also just exclude Google or any other news-aggrigators they don't like and either a) create their own search engine/news-aggrigators or negotiate an agreement with Google.
But of course weeping and crying is not only more easily, but with a new law they can extend their rights indefinitely. Right now the discussion is about the Topics and automatically extracted excerpts that should be protected for one year. In 5 years they will push the law for a protection of 5 years, and sooner or later it will be "aligned" with German copyright law and Topics and automatically extracted excerpts are protected for 70 years.
from http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Google-Leistungsschutzrecht-beispielloser-Eingriff-ins-Netz-1671227.html
"Presseverlage im Online-Bereich mit anderen Werkmittlern gleichzustellen" und fordern die Bundesregierung auf, nicht "halbherzig" zu handeln.
Meaning that they want the same copyright protection for topics and excerpts that they have for the article itself, meaning 70 years after the death of the author.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Able wants folks to know he is a relevant news source so he
posts some news in public on a street corner and Baker sees it.
Baker gets a cup of coffee for telling Charlie where to find it.
Charlie goes to the street corner and reads it.
Able now wants a sip of Baker's coffee.
Also, if Charlie makes money from what he read, then Able wants a percentage.
Seems like Able wants to both have and eat his cake.
He wants to post the news to advertize,
but wants to get paid if someone makes money from reading it where he posted it.
If he wanted to get paid, he should not have posted the news in public?
This isn't a question of copyright, because neither Baker or Charlie copied the news they only read it on a street corner and used it.
(Unless you want to eliminate the right to use what you have read,
but then nobody would ever want to read any published work for fear that they would never again be able to do anything that happened to be writeen in the work.)
It might be a question of breaking and entering a private place.
If Able loaned Baker a private key for the first reading and Baker make a copy of the key,
then if Baker gave Charlie a key so he could read it as well,
then maybe Able has a case against Charlie and Baker.
(If you give the 'private' key to anybody, then I'm not sure there is an expectation of privacy.)
Perhaps the question is what's a public place.
If it's inside a locked building it's for sure not public.
If it's in public view in a public place, it's for sure public.
In between, I'm not sure.
What's the equlivalent of a 'lock', 'public view' and 'public place' for the web?
If spiders are permitted, it feels unlocked and public.
(The paper can't publically ask Google to birng folks to their site but then claim it's private.)
If the paper requires no login, and browsing gives you a simple URL, it feels unlocked and public.
(If the paper doesn't care when someone comes normally to the site, they can't start caring when he tells his friend.)
If a login is required and it gives you a one-time page view key as a URL, then it feels locked and not public.
(If the paper did this with a secure key, then Google shouldn't be able to link to the site.
On the other hand, there is no requirement to use a 'good' lock to keep your property private.
A closed door should be sufficient to keep folks honest.)
I think I just discovered a new business model (if the German plan goes through, anyway): Make content (or buy it from someone else, like the AP or Reuters), get it indexed by Google for several years, then "suddenly realize" that Google is indexing your pages in a way that generates income via pageviews/ads, then sue Google for back-royalties for all the years they "unfairly" linked to said content. Brilliant, if I do say so myself.
That's a bit like an advertising agency paying for the privilege to advertise a company's service. You would have to be almost completely mentally retarded to suggest such legislation - but of course we are talking about politicians here; politicians and technology. Oh well. I guess there are plenty of other sites Google can choose to index for free. Good luck trying to get traffic.
4b.1) An annual % based on click through traffic.
Have gnu, will travel.
Any news site not wanting a search engine linking to them need no legislation. All they need to do is create a file called robots.txt in the root folder of their site with the following content:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will ensure said news site is never seen by anyone. The choice is yours and under your full control.
... news outlets are not averse to having a ridiculously inflammatory headline that has little or no relation to the article within....
I couldn't agree more!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
That is, the site appears in the search listing as www.deutschebag.com with no more information.
I thought Zazzle sold Deutsche bags.
If something like this becomes law in Germany, i really, really hope that Google doesn't cave on this one. It seems like Google has caved on stuff lately. If Google caves and pays, the floodgates would open and every country in the world would start demanding fees from Google for this and that.
IP is going away. This is just the death throes. IP is a way to control your personal property. For everything content based it means that someone prevents you from having 0's and 1's in specific sequences on a computer you own.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Yeah, but don't you remember that France and Germany are part of Old Europe? In terms of badness, that's right besides Sweden (remember? home of those ebil file-sharing pirates) and only slightly above North Korea and Cuba, I guess.
Belgium v. Google redux. *jijiji*
> So now the publishers want to get compensated for
> those excerpts
Google, go lobby Merkel's CDU, the Bundestag/rat for the right to charge German websites' indexing fees! Make the fees/indexing opt out, too. It's for their own good, your bottom line, that Myface competition is killing your margins. You need help, just like the German publishers do.
If they want to squeeze some money out of big multinational corporations in Europe, the first thing to do is banning unfair fiscal tricks such as the infamous "Dutch sandwich".
I'll admit, I didn't want to click the link because I'd never heard the phrase before, but just the title sounds vaguely like some sort of perverted sexual practice.
Please tell me they didn't include them in News because they'd modified their robots file to exclude the google news bot? PLEASE tell me Google didn't have to add an exception rule because these companies are too stupid to use the internet?
It probably doesn't speak well of me, but I would just internally replace the word 'German' with 'NAZI' for all search results for a while, or return "No reference to 'Germany' found" for any relevant search. Captcha's originating from German government controlled ip's would all be "Sieg Heil!". Oh the lulz.
Please tell me they didn't include them in News because they'd modified their robots file to exclude the google news bot? PLEASE tell me Google didn't have to add an exception rule because these companies are too stupid to use the internet?
I don't know; the article didn't say. It did say they had started to make use of the standard technologies to control what was indexed and cached. But the other is also possible.
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