German Law To Make Google Pay For Snippets 117
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."
Re:Yeah, that's fine. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ya, if anything the market has shifted the opposite direction, and you pay them to get your website featured prominently (however you want to define that specifically).
Search engines have no incentive to pay to link. As long as they can minimally link for free they will, and if they have to pay for everything they link, well that isn't going to happen is it, because then you'd have no search.
It's like demanding the phone company pay businesses for the right to list their name in the phonebook.
A couple of weeks ago there was a story here about some campground in spain getting screwed because a search for Alfaques or whatever it was produced a slew of images from some terrible accident near them 30 years ago. That happens because the people who publish those images have made sure their results are at the top of searches, with images in thumbnails, and they are bigger companies than the small little campground. The system can't work both directions at once, and I can't imagine it working with search providers having to pay for what they are currently paid for.
Re:Yeah, that's fine. (Score:4, Interesting)
Honest question:
Can you configure robots.txt to allow Google to index your site for search results without summarizing your news in news.google.com?