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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!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
But this forces users to pay twice: once for the use of Google, now that they'll charge per search; and once to view the full article after reading the abstract on the publisher's site! You don't want the publishers to earn money twice!?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
... 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.
Google, Bing, Yahoo et.al. should just stop indexing German news sites. Let's see what happens to news revenue when that happens.
German news sites sue Google and Bing (whoe really uses Yahoo anymore...) for damages in German courts and wins huge sums?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The website are also perfectly free to use robots.txt
No need for this law.
They should go a step further. Stop indexing all German news sites and charge a fee to those who want their articles in the search indexes, since it is additional overhead for Google to make exceptions for them.
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.
The Globe and Mail put up a 10 free samples per month, then we block you and redirect you to a subscription nag screen wall. It was mildly annoying to have to click on somebody else's link to the same story, until I made a wild guess and found that firefox private browsing mode disabled the block.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
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.
Normally, yes. However, given the nature of the web, publishing content that has no password on it is in itself an opt-in. The web is for things you want seen. For those few cases where that is not the intent (and it really is a minuscule percentage), robots.txt may be used to clarify your position. At one time, robots.txt WAS opt-in but too many of that vast majority who wanted to be in the search engines didn't know about it and wondered why they were never spidered.
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.
that would be abusing the search ~monopoly for a different business.
there are two separate businesses here
1) google search (newspapers want to be in this, but possibly don't want snippets showing)
2) google news (newspapers want payment for snippets in this)
at the moment, they can opt out of 1, or 2 independently using robots.txt
if they switch to demanding payment for #2, then google should just de-list them from #2 until they pay an advertising fee (which is coincidentally equal to the government mandated copyright charge plus 15% admin cost).
if google removed companies from #1 as a result of their position on #2 then that would be a clear abuse of power.
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