Slashdot Mirror
German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets
itwbennett writes German publishers said they are bowing to Google's market power, and will allow the search engine to show news snippets in search results free of charge — at least for the time being. The decision is a step in an ongoing legal dispute between the publishers and Google in which, predictably, publishers are trying to get compensation from the search engine for republishing parts of their content and Google isn't interested in sharing revenue. The move follows a Google decision earlier this month — and which was to go into effect today — to stop using news snippets and thumbnails for some well-known German news sites.
They wanted Google to give them revenue or stop using their articles. So Google said, fine we will stop using your articles, good luck when you lose 65% of your daily hits since we know they come through us...
I'm trying to wrap my brain around how these news outlets thought it was bad for Google to send traffic their way. Seems like any news agency would want to be a high-placed hit on Google's, or anyone else's, news listing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Why isn't Google charging them, as the only one who ever drives any traffic to their sites?
He who has the gold and all that...
When I search for news sights I use the little snippet under the link to see if that's the article I want to read, I don't just want to first paragraph nowadays, especially since most "news" sites wrtie like magazines instead of newspapers. Gone are the days of reading one paragraph that summarizes the whole story, they're full of fluff and links to "relevant" articles that I don't click on (mostly cause it's harder and harder to tell what's spam or malware type sites vs legitimate ones.
They didn't want to google to not send traffic their way, they just wanted to be payed for the privilege as well.
"Wait wait wait! We still want the free advertising that comes from Google's use of our content! We just want Google to pay us for the privilege of giving us a service we would otherwise have to pay for, in exchange for displaying content we already give away for free online!"
Sad. I get so sick of people griping about the effects of Amazon and Google (etc), without giving a second thought to just how much they already get in return for the relationship. Same idea goes for Amazon and Hachette - They have every right to refuse to sell at the price Amazon wants; they'll just never sell another eBook.
They didn't think it was bad. That's evident based on this story.
They wanted Googles money and tried to exploit outdated laws written 100yrs ago to modern technology to try and extort that money. You know, like what every other media organization that's currently dieing because of the internet is trying to do.
Apparently the publishers didn't want to exercise that right.
That's why they gave in. They knew that showing up on Google's search results with a small text sample is very big in traffic to their web sites. However, they wanted to exploit some legal triviality to demand that Google pay them for the privilege of increasing public awareness of their articles.
Google made the only intelligent choice when faced with such idiotic demands, and the Germans involved made the only not-entirely-suicidal choice when faced with Google's decision.
I'm trying to wrap my brain around how these news outlets thought it was bad for Google to send traffic their way.
Because they myopically stop thinking at "Google steals our content, grar!"
On a somewhat more excusable level, they just haven't yet come to terms with how people read news today. People (under 60) don't casually read the whole newspaper over breakfast anymore; they go to a news aggregation site and skim the headlines. When they find something of interest, they click through to read more - But, they don't necessarily click through to the Nowheresville Tribute, they click through to WaPo or NYT, or perhaps to a media outlet that focuses more on a preferred aspect of most stories (for example, reading about German newspaper contractual negotiations at Slashdot vs reading about them at Groklaw vs reading about them in Time).
20 years ago, you woke up in the morning, heard a "phhhpmp" at the front door, went over, saw the newspaper that you pay to get delivered every morning on your carpet under the letterbox, would grab it, take it to the table, make yourself breakfast, and then read. You'd read news from that newsppaer. That newspaper would take on the honored (or not so honored in some paper's cases) role and responsibility of guiding you through what's happening in the world. To that paper, that position was a relationship to be developed, nurtured, built upon. Your loyal readers would come back day after day, they'd actually subscribe.
Today, you visit a website on your tablet, phone, or PC, usually multiple times a day. Britney Spears' nosejob is a click away from your Twitter stream to the CNN website. An email comes in, and you, on the recommendation of your friend, reading a Huffington Post article about cats. Then you get another email from your mother, and you're on healthy-stuff.com reading about the seven fruits that might stop you getting cancer. Oh, and a person walks by your desk, and says "Did you hear? OMG you didn't? It's everywhere, terrorists just attacked the Dallas book depository, hundreds dead!", and where do you go?
Well, Google, You go to Google. You enter "dallas", and you already have a choice of articles to read, but you click on "More news about Dallas" and there are 50,000 breaking news articles about the incident at the book depository, including articles from news organizations you've never heard of, that are local to Dallas, whose views and coverage you'll respect for this one story... and then never visit again.
At no point have you ever said "You know, I'm going to get my news from the St Olaf Bugle, I'm looking forward to reading it tomorrow."
That is what they're afraid of. That's why several publishers are getting out of the newspaper business altogether, it's why Rupert Murdoch keeps doing stupid things like buying social media networks and starting enewspapers for tablets, and it's why German newspapers are not overly enthusiastic about having their work featured on Google News.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It's even more ridiculous than that: the relevant law is not 100 years old. It went just into effect this year thanks to a massive lobby effort by the media.
The new law is called "Leistungsschutzrecht" (law to protect the power) and has been titulated by it's many critics as a "lex google".
As is evident by this outcome, the whole thing backfired.
Too bad the law has now the exact opposite effect as intended: it prevents small bloggers from citating news and allows the big google to work as before.
The law they had their cronies enact is still on the books. It's only Google that no longer has to give a shit about it, but it's still there to threaten innovation.
Google stopped displaying snippets and thumbnails Oct 1.. German Publishers relent Oct 23..
Now let that be another lesson for the history books..
Companies pay Google to advertise for them. These companies wanted Google to pay them to advertise for them. Never did follow that logic.
The publishers base part of their claim on a German online copyright law that came into effect last August, which gave publishers the exclusive right to the commercial use of their content and parts thereof, except in the case of single words or small text snippets.
We're talking about a country where you can't even rent out DVDs you own, unless you have an official licensed rental copy. This is where GEMA (their RIAA) priced Youtube out of the market per play. This is a country that supports making art owners pay artists a residual on art they own upon sale/auction (imagine you had to pay bricklayers or carpenters like this when selling a house). Similiar to england, you also have to pay taxes on every radio you own, every monitor (as it can be used as a TV, in theory).
Used to be that you had to have a monitor and was a quasi voluntary tax you could avoid saying you didn't have any of that (but the harassment was not worth it), as of 2013, every household has to be 18 euro /month ($22.75) regardless of TV or radio usage. We're talking about over $7.5B a year for truly shitty programming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Germany rose up in the 19th Century as an industrial power very quickly because they had cheap books, people could own an entire bookshelf's worth for a fraction of what it cost in England. A lot looser IP or even for some time, no IP. Now copyright holders and entrenched interest strangle everything.
Despite having a decent software industry, Germany is having a tough time keeping up with the internet. Nearly all the good ideas are implemented first in America and elsewhere, and then come to them. If the legislators allow it. The entrenched interests fight awfully hard.
They are certainly losing out to feed old and dying interests.
The power of the monopoly.
Couldn't it be both?
They're not even exploiting the law. Google used market power because it was easiest, but it could have defended the fact that snippets are quotes, and quotes are fair use.
Am I the only one in welcoming this outcome, because loathing strong-arm monopolies, err... monopolies period...?
Just waiting for things to go 180deg...
If some companies get benefit from free advertising by google, perhaps they'll get even more benefit if they greased it with a little bit of payola... You know, kinda how yelp does things... ;^)
It may be difficult to build a positive reputation under these circumstances, but it's not hard to build a negative one.
When looking through Google news, I actively avoid FOX news for example, because they crash my browser.
I use to consider the Christian Science Monitor somewhat respectable despite the name, until they started with bait-and-switch paywalled articles. Now I avoid them too.
So, reputation still matters. All you have to do is don't fuck it up like these assclowns did.
You lost me when you said something about there being books in Texas...
The German publishers wanted a new law to protect their content, they got it, and are now disappointed that no one wants their content.
Google got sued, and stopped using the content to limit it's risk.
I think it's good that no one could force Google into buying that content. (although German law is full of goverment mandated licensing of state run public radio and TV, licensing fees for computers, printers and optical media)
BTW: Other search engines did the same thing month ago and nobody complained.
I believe the actual concern is that with a long enough snippet, people lose interest, and instead of driving traffic to the web site, you actually detract from the traffic that gets sent to the site.
This was a concern for U.S. newspapers as well, a few years back, but given that most of their content is syndicated off the AP newswire, or by United Press International, or by Reuters, or some other wire service, there's very little left of value in a paper that's failing to do journalism, and therefore isn't creating content that a clone of everyone else's content.
So, maybe losing all your content visibility on Google was worse than them publishing a small article headline?
So, maybe, just maybe, Google's exposure was actually to your advantage?
So maybe you've been biting the hand that feeds you?
If the threat of Google doing EXACTLY what you ask for (taking your content off their site) is enough to make you back down, maybe your original intention was something other than was stated?
Maybe you just wanted a free payment?
And maybe Google weren't being so evil in the first place?
Please cite the GERMAN statute regarding "fair use".
.
. .
If I remember correctly Germany doesn't follow American law...
(Well, except where the various US lobbies have bitchslapped the State Department to drive the US I.P. position down other countries throats. (which doesn't include forcing 'fair use' on other countries...))
The laws are not outdated. They allow papers to make money off their work. Google showing your slashdot comment or other non-professional content without permission is okay as you're gaining any income from your comment nor is it capable of generating much revenue.
There is a big difference between amateur and professional content. Google should try to reach an agreement with the papers about what to display and what to skip. For example, if the snippet states "Italy Beat Germany 3-2," along with many details, many readers might skip visiting the original site as they already have the information they want from the google snippet. In this case, the distributor (Google) makes money but the creator/copyright holder (News website) makes no money, which is not fair.
Nobody reads all the articles in a newspaper. Most read less than a dozen articles and only skim the headlines and the summary of the remaining articles. Are the newspapers going to be financially compensated for the revenue generated due to the snippets? That revenue is going 100% to google and that's not fair. It's very much like music distributors making all the money, while the music creators make nothing.
It may very well be the types of software that I've looked at, but almost every time I see that a particular piece of software has a German developer, the English support is non-existent or poor at best. Which is quite surprising to me as ~65% of the population speaks English.. Contrast that to Russian (~6%) or Czech (~27%), which (in my experience) has been much more friendly|open to English support|forums|help files.
There are lot's of free options. Hardly anyone uses them but they're available and free.
Google agreed to drop the articles. That's certainly fair. Somehow the newspapers didn't think so though. Why? Because they need Google more than Google needs them. Evidently they need that Google traffic so they must make money off it after all.
I've never seen a single advertisement on Google news. It may be different in Germany, but otherwise I don't see how they are making money. It's a free service. Perhaps re-enforcing their brand image, but not 'making all the money'. I am far more likely to read more details (even with the 3-2 score type of thing you mention) than to skip. (Haven't used Google News in a long time, had to re-check just now to confirm the no advertisement thing).
And he didn't even miss you.....
Not quite. They even tried to force Google to continue displaying the articles, stating that Google would abuse its market share by kicking them out of the index.
So, basically, they tried to force Google to advertise for their newspaper articles while making them pay for it.
Well, they're still mulling how to make money off google news. Remember, google search and facebook also did not make any money for years after they were released. So, google news is not a non-profit, nor a charity.
This is the heart of the matter... do you read every single article associated with a snippet you read? I highly doubt it. That's how many people read newspapers... they skim the articles (same as snippets) and only fully read certain very interesting articles. In this case, the copyright holder (newspaper) is not getting paid for the snippets consumed by the reader, instead the distributor (google) is getting paid (or will be paid once they have a revenue model). Google cannot and should not apply the same business model it applies to low-quality and/or free content it gets elsewhere from the web.
In fact, google owes the copyright holders a portion of its adsense revenue for displaying their content and profiting from it. Without that free content, adsense would be unable to make any money.
there's a nice little bit of technology available for quite some time right now. Actually two pieces of technology. One is called robots.txt in which you can tell globally not to index (or follow) links in a directory of your page. The other is to add a meta tag to your web site (META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX")
I'm quite sure google follows at least one of these quasi-standards. Both are quite old, the meta-tag one is from 1996 or so, IIRC.
But hey, why tell someone not to index your site when you actually want them to give you traffic *and* pay you for the "privilege" to do so?
Not law to protect power. In this context, Leistung is not translated as power. It is more like: law to protect the effort (that is put into writing a news articles).
The background is, the VG Media (VG - Verwertungsgesellschaft - imho roughly translated - according to dict.cc - collecting society), more or less bought this law by massive lobbying to extort money from google.
It is a little bit like protection money.
Google, you have to pay us for showing snippets from us in the search results, but we are forcing you with the cartel office to show them; in other news: Just give us money without doing anything.
I would like to see Google turn around and say "You know what, pay us for your referrals to your website or we will block you."
Actually, they wanted their work featured on Google News and get paid for it. Google said that they will only show so much of their work as they can do freely according to the law. But now the conundrum for the publishers came up: If Google shows the snippets including a thumbnail of the featured picture, the publishers fear people will just skim that and not click through to their site to read the article. That's why they wanted to be compensated for those people just skimming. But if Google only shows the headline, which it could for free, it might not be enough to get people interested to click through to the article. So they don't get people click through to their article either -- so no money again.
Unless people only read the snippets, and don't go to the source site.
You keep mentioning how they "get paid" but never refute it. You also cleverly do not include my mention that I don't use the service. The copyright holders that get extra clicks should be paying google for the adsense , not the other way around. you are quite simply incorrect on this matter. I do not work for google company. (disclaimer)
Actually, the papers lobbied hard for the law and got it. Then they held up the law and made their demand. Google replied, "your wish is my command". Then the papers collectively said "EEEEEEEKK!, er, uh, could we go back to the way it was before?". Google kindly obliged.
Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
You pretend that Google displaying more than the headline and the link would keep people away from visiting the news site.
That is just outright wrong.
1. If Google didn't display the link at all, there would be no people to not visit this link.
2. The newspapers themselves often put the most essential bit of information in the headline.
3. Google sends MILLIONS of visitors per month to the newspapers.Even if it was true that displaying some of the content would stop some people from following the link, the net gain for the newspapers is still enormous.
A Google news link has the same format as a slashdot story link. Google news shows the title of the story and a small snippet copied from a copyrighted article. Are you telling me there are no slashdotters who went to the comment section without RTFA? There are plenty, and so your statement is completely false. Google news snippets can and will prevent newspapers from getting the page hits.
Then why does google news also display a snippet. Remove the snippet.
No, it's quite debatable that there is a net gain for the news sites. After all, if I can get all the news stories from google news, why should I bother visiting any individual news site? I can just browse google news, scan the snippets, for which google is paying nothing, and only read certain cherry picked articles that interest me.
It's time google learnt to pay for copyrighted content instead of strong arming weaker entities into an unfair deal (you won't give us free content, we won't give you free traffic).
Actually, the papers lobbied hard for the law and got it. Then they held up the law and made their demand. Google replied, "your wish is my command". Then the papers collectively said "EEEEEEEKK!, er, uh, could we go back to the way it was before?". Google kindly obliged.
Google did not oblige yet by the time this became news since it was supposed to go into effect just then. And you are missing the part where the papers ran to the Kartellamt and asked them to force Google to continue publishing the articles like previously so that they would be able to get the fees. The Kartellamt had not returned an official verdict, but its head said he'd have a hard time figuring out how even a monopoly position would be legal grounds to force Google to buy content it did not want.
Mom, if you were in a German Sheisse movie, you'd tell me right?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
I know. Why do you think they want to be compensated for it, if, as the original poster argued, the mere presence of their work in search results is positive compared to search results existing where they're not present?
Their problem is the existence of search results to begin with. They want compensation from the fact they have to exist in an environment that's actively hostile towards the way they're structured, and they don't see an easy way to adapt to that environment.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.