German Law To Make Google Pay For Snippets

judgecorp writes "The German government has announced plans for a copyright law which would require Google, other search engines, and aggregators to pay for small snippets of text displayed on their pages. Journalistic citations and private users will be exempt."

Yeah, that's fine.

[gcnaddict]

Google, Bing, et al. will just stop linking to sites which enforce this.

Who thought this was a good idea?

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[MarkvW]

This is a great idea. If a site wants to keep their material off Google, then they can. If they want their material to be on Google, they can do that too.

I fail to see the problem.

All link to english web site

[aepervius]

It is not that I don't trust you all guy, but I would rather read the german law than the (eventually biased) interpretation by some english blog/web site.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[ichthus]

see robots.txt [wikipedia.org]. Google honors mine.

This should turn out good

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see Google just stop displaying snippets, and see how long it takes for them to realize that no one can find their articles anymore

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[medcalf]

It requires needless software development. Instead of honoring robots.txt for sites that don't agree to be indexed, Google will either have to extend robots.txt to allow oppt in or alter their internal code with a list of what they will not index regardless of robots.txt. More cruft and potentially nonstandard extensions on the web is not a good thing. Or Google could just stop indexing any site with an IP addr in Germany.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[dkf]

Which is pretty much an internet death sentence. Smart.

So? Google is not under an actual legal obligation to index or describe any site hosted in Germany (or anywhere else). The enormous majority of people outside Germany wouldn't care if their sites vanished from the face of the earth. The simplest technical response to such a law would therefore be for search engines to not return any matches at all for German sites (and to not provide any results at all to people in Germany). Very simple to implement. Complies with the law.

Also totally not what the legislator had in mind, but who cares about what passes for thought in his or her neck of the woods?

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Dishevel]

Google is not required to do business in any single country.
Google can not be touched if it just pulls everything out of Germany then de lists all German sites and shuts down its .gr domain.
What are they going to do? Demand that Google do business in Germany?
Fuck em.

Re:Yeah, that's fine.

[Your.Master]

Leaving aside your assumption that Google can afford to do this more than Germany can (obviously both sides can, but I think Google would be the clear loser in pulling out of Germany), you're not answering the question that was asked.

The question was about Google refusing to service sites which insist that German law be enforced, implying that Google would still serve German sites that let them pass. I strongly suspect that would be illegal whether or not there's any antitrust concerns.