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."

Comments

Just remove it from Google's DB

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Just remove it from Google's DB

[Hentes]

They could already remove themselves with robots.txt if they wanted to. I bet if Google removed them they would sue it for unfair competition. This is nothing more than extortion.

Re:Just remove it from Google's DB

[sjames]

Exactly. Google already 'pays' for the excerpts by sending them eyeballs for their ad revenue. If they'd rather not have all those eyeballs, they are already free to make their preferences known through robots.txt. Surely, by welcoming Google's crawler knowing what that entails, they have agreed to the excerpts.

More proof the publishing industry...

[blahplusplus]

... 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.

Re:Just stop indexing them

[viperidaenz]

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.

Here's what'll happen.

[Arancaytar]

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

Re:Just stop indexing them

[bmo]

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.

--
BMO

Re:Yea Google!

[king neckbeard]

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.