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German Copyright Bill Would Let Publishers Charge Search Engines For Excerpts
An anonymous reader writes with this news from Australia's Computerworld: "The German parliament is set to discuss a controversial online copyright bill that is meant to allow news publishers to charge search engines such as Google for reproducing short snippets from their articles. Earlier this week, Google started a campaign against the proposed law. Google was criticized for its campaign against the law. The search engine 'obviously' tries to use its own users for lobbying interests 'under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet,' wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling, politicians of the CDU and CSU conservative parties, who together form the biggest block in the German parliament."
Seriously, Germany's copyright views should be canned by anyone willing to take up the fight.
If google/bing/yahoo/ whoever were to remove all of the articles from their DB the publishers would loose all business from the internet.. Surely this would take 1 month offline before they came crawling back to the Search Engines (literally).
This is truly a surprising development!
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I geuss this will mean Google wont be indexing these sites... Therefore the articles wont be on G and therefor their articles can be used by someone else without any duplicate content penalty from Google. This is going to bite the germans in the ass.
They'll hurt themselves. :)
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
People can already charge for excerpts by putting their content behind a paywall.
In fact, even that one newspaper who did actually got a decent sustainable profit by putting said content behind a paywall, despite concerns.
If the price is right, people will pay for content.
The free web is just more convenient for most people, it isn't the only solution. Never has been.
Having a bill created for it seems redundant and even potentially abusive.
... doesn't understand the internet.
Much of the books you find on google are not in user-friendly form and they allow you to find books that you could have NEVER have found in another era. These idiots under-estimate the long-tail of finding books that get lost because of the limited amount of time and attention people have for the limited amount of adspace that exists.
I've found tonnes of books I would never have known about otherwise, these idiots are shooting themselves in the foot.
And that should also hide path part of url since it can contain part of copyrighted content. And see how useful it is.
Google, Bing, Yahoo et.al. should just stop indexing German news sites. Let's see what happens to news revenue when that happens.
If the law passes, the search engines will go "fuck that" and only index free content or newspapers that specifically allow their stuff to be indexed for free. The other newspapers will lose their only remaining readers under fifty and die out along with that generation.
There are some newspapers in my country who actually get the internet.
ZEIT launches searchable news archive with API
If everybody jumped at everything proposed in legislature at all the foreign governments, obesity would be a thing of the past.
Every once in a great while I'll get what I need form the summary of that page (ex. definition, reference), but the other 99.5% I click the link and go to the page like I normally would & I don't think my googling habits are unique in any way, so this type of law would make websites have to adapt... more descriptive page headers & titles for starters, or... they can just keep using the current system, which nobody seems to mind, but I doubt google would pay however many sites are out there to promote their content for them, it's the other way around.
It is long past time for the major engines to work together for a week to simply pull all of the news items from those nations. If French and German news sources lose their customers during that time, I think that they will appreciate what the engines do for them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
would be for Google to block search results, and mention in news pages, for any publisher objecting to reasonable quotes. If they don't want publicity, they should be accommodated.
The search engine "obviously" tries to use its own users for lobbying interests "under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet," wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling
I exclusively use duckduckgo as my search engine, not wanting to be bubbled or tracked by Google. That being said, Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling are ignorant if they think this law won't have devestating repercussions for both search relevance and news sites income. This is a money grab by failing online news sites, and it is going to come back to bite them when the following three inevitabilities occur:
1. Legitimate search engines like Bing and Google stop cataloging German sites, either in protest of law or for the obvious fiscal reason of avoiding fees and expensive lawsuits.
2. New search engines emerge, hosted somewhere German companies cannot touch them. These extrajudicial search engines index all news sites and throw anybody the finger if they demand money.
3. New or existing news organizations that have half a brain come out against the law, and explicitly open up their site to be freely indexed by all search engines. These few businesses thrive in what has become a vacuum for German news.
4. Overall traffic to the other news sites plummet as they lose their primary source of referrals--search engines. In response to their failing business, they attempt to implement a paywall; but with the drastic decrease in readership caused by the new law, there simply aren't enough customers to support the new business model. As a last ditch effort they make an app for the iPad. No one cares.
As evidenced by the Mardi Gras beads in the link, Curiosity discovered evidence of life; just not intelligent life.
For CEOs, it is easier to for them to pay for somethings than give away something for free. So Google, Bing, etc, should come up with the service for those publishers and charge them like $1000 a months to index their website and list it on the search result. If they don't pay, no index for them. It's now a fair game among the publishers thus they can't really sue Google, Bing, etc for anti-competitive.
Then Google, Bing, etc can compete with each others for lower rate. After a while, one, and soon after that, all of them will offer free listing, and those CEO will jump with joy (we didn't have to pay for it anymore, yeh!!)
Problem solved.
Robots.txt is opt-out - I thought we liked opt-out rather than opt-in.
Is this about search results? Most similar laws in the past have been about Google News (and similar services from other search engines). If they're asking to charge for search context, then sure they're shooting themselves in the foot - I don't know about you, but I hate results with no context. If they're trying to shut down Google News https://news.google.com/ then it's a slightly different story ... only slightly though, Google does only include snippets there too.
Google should consider each of those excerpts as advertisements of the news articles. Then, they should turn around and charge the news organizations for them.
That advertisement fee should cover the cost of the copyright plus the administration costs of managing those fees. That way the news companies would end up paying more to Google than Google pays them back.
What's rather funny is, that all partie's (CDU/CSU/SPD/GREENS/LIBERALS/PIRATES) youth organisations said in a joint statement (the Left was left out, but they say the same), that the law is stupid.
Publisher do not mind being indexed, what they mind is the scrapping of their page and using exerpt, in say, google news. Why is that ? Because there are a lot of people like me which simply look at google new, read the exerpt, and don't bother with the full article. And that is that many impression / hit on their homepage that the publisher *loses*.
So again , this is not about indexing, this is about using news exerpt like this : http://news.google.com/?edchanged=1&ned=de&authuser=0.
As for threat of removing from the index, big fucking deal. The bulk of what such online journal get is daily ad impression due to recurring visitor. What they see is the industry as a whole would get more recurring visitor if google news do not exists.
The supreme stupidity here is that a law is not needed. If the sites don't want to be indexed, it's dead simple to set up robots.txt to keep out Google and the others. But that's been pointed out thousands of times by now. So if they and the courts are not getting it by now, it is because they choose not to get it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
As opposed to... the German press and publishers, who have been abusing their position to misinform and manipulate public opinion for their own financial gain for decades.
It would not let publishers charge search engines, it would make searchengines no longer index germany...
The search engines will simply REMOVE all links to the news agencies, and will start CHARGING them to do so.
That's what I will do.
'Google was criticized for its campaign against the law. [...] "It is a remarkable process, that a company uses the public for its own economic interests," they wrote.'
How dare Google try to defeat this measure by speaking directly to the voters, instead of trying to sway the system with its money like any respectable company!