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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)"
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
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.
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.
I'm sure they knew exactly as much as about it as the lobbyists for the publishers thought they should know.
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.
Yes. Requiring that the people in charge knows what they are talking about would limit who could be put in charge to intelligent and rational people, which is called elitism, and that's not socially acceptable. So it is indeed too much to ask.
However it is not too much to ask, in my opinion, that the drafter of any bills are held personally responsible for it. If say this bill passes and company A is suddenly pressing Google for X millions in compensation, Google should be able to sue the person drafting the bill, prompting a legal review by the highest legal court in the country. If the bill/law is found to be bad OR the drafter is found to have drafted it specifically to benefit the interests of companies/people they are personally involved with (like insider trading, except for law) then the law should be repealed, and the drafter should be held personally responsible for the X millions in compensation that Google would owe company A for the time the law was in effect.
That should make most politicians think twice about what they put their name on.
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.
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
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?
Because operating a webserver is basically opting-in to being part of the World Wide Web.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
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
Because one can safely assume that being listed in Googles index is what website operaters want. The existance of all those black- white- grey- and donkey-hat SEOs supports that assumption.
But I partly agree, if someone would re-invent the internet and write specifications from scratch, opt-in should be the norm. But once again. THAT's NOT THE POINT here!
Google offered those publishers who are pushing for that law, to ignore their pages, so they wouldn't even have to opt-out, but the following outcry "Google threatens to unlist us!!!!" was even louder than the former one "Google indexes our pages without paying compensation"
This is NOT about indexing or being found by google news. Everybody wants to be indexed by Google!
They simply want money!
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.
TFA doesn't explain the situation... at all.
Newspapers seem to think that Google wants their content to create services like Google News and enhance its search results, from which it derives profit. The problem is that Google's attitude is that web sites have to make their own money from visitors, which makes sense for search but Google News is essentially creating a kind of "digital newspaper" from other people's content.
Because Google integrates news stories into its search results the line between the two is now blurred. Personally I think Google is right here, and while some profit sharing would be nice doing so would set a dangerous precedent.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Courts aren't stupid... They would still recognize that as an equally unfair action against competitors.
bickerdyke
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
Because publishing something to the Internet makes it public by default.
If you don't want your information to be public, you hide it behind passwords and login forms. Once its public, there's no reason to stop people from indexing.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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.