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German Publishers Capitulate, Let Google Post News Snippets

Posted by timothy on from the ja-ja-gut dept.

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.

2 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No, wait, do-over! by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 3, Informative

    There certainly is an anti-trust issue here, but it's on the Hatchette side, not the Amazon side:

    E-book price fixing settlements rolling out

    In December, a judge approved settlements involving book publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin after a federal court ruled they conspired with Amazon rival Apple. In the lawsuit, the Justice Department claimed Apple conspired with book publishers to fix prices in order to thwart a discount initiative from Amazon.

    Hatchette is now trying to reinstate the price-fixing it just got fined $69 million over via other avenues. And of course all the usual idiots are falling for the "Ooo, Amazon evil!" propaganda because Hatchette is the publisher for a lot of high power media personality who can go on TV and pretend this is all about "the little guy" rather than padding thier own pockets.

  2. Re:And three weeks to think it over. by amiga3D · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know if I'd call bing competition. All the computers at work are stuck with IE as the web browser, no other option. Every one of those had bing as default. I can't find a single one that hasn't been switched to Google. I know one guy who couldn't figure out how to switch it so he had to suffer with bing for a week until he got someone to show him how to change it. bing doesn't suck, it swallows.