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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."
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).
... 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.
It's the way of the world. Without big money behind the opposition these laws will steamroll right through.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The website are also perfectly free to use robots.txt
No need for this law.
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
How would that even be winnable?
Publishers: "Hurr! Give us moneys to index us!"
Search providers: "No, it's fair use."
Publishers: "We will sue!"
Search providers: "Go ahead"
Court: "It's not fair use. Pay them."
Search providers: "Sure thing, but after this, no indexing"
Publishers: "We'll sue!"
Search providers: "For what, exactly, complying with the court order?"
Court: "by not indexing, they're not infringing"
Publishers: "WAAAAA IT'S NOT FAIR!"
This already happend in Belgium.
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BMO
The website are also perfectly free to use robots.txt
Yes, but they don't want to not be listed, they are holding their hand out wanting free money.
Google doesn't need to be sympathetic here. They are right. This law is batshit crazy, so even if Google was run by Adolf HItler, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs, they'd still be on the right side of this argument.
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You can hate Thomas Edison before reading the Oatmeal, and for things unrelated to Tesla. He was a monopolist in multiple fields, he tortured puppies for profit, and he's given very bad yet often quoted advice to generations of people. His actions have caused humanity a great deal of harm. The man was a cunt despite being viewed as a hero for nearly a century. Just for the record, I hated Edison long before the Oatmeal made a comic about him and Tesla
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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.