German Copyright Bill Would Let Publishers Charge Search Engines For Excerpts 114
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."
Just remove it from Google's DB (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
And that's what is going to happen. And maybe after a few months of web stats crashing, they'll figure out it's not terribly wise to bite the hand that feeds you.
More proof the publishing industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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:Yea Google! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the way of the world. Without big money behind the opposition these laws will steamroll right through.
Re:More proof the publishing industry... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've spent a significant money on iTunes after googling up lyrics I heard on the radio or in a shop.
Of course the Right Owners tried to shut these lyrics sites down.
Re:Broken example by them (Score:4, Insightful)
The website are also perfectly free to use robots.txt
No need for this law.
Here's what'll happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [developer.zeit.de]
Re:Just remove it from Google's DB (Score:5, Insightful)
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 stop indexing them (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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BMO
Re:Just remove it from Google's DB (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Broken example by them (Score:2, Insightful)
The website are also perfectly free to use robots.txt
Yes, but they don't want to not be listed, they are holding their hand out wanting free money.
Re:Yea Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just remove it from Google's DB (Score:5, Insightful)
"Obviously Google is discriminating against us by removing our listings. The German government should pass a law REQUIRING Google to include our sites. While still paying the copyright fees, of course."
Re:Yea Google! (Score:3, Insightful)
Again people are missing the point (Score:2, Insightful)
So again , this is not about indexing, this is about using news exerpt like this : http://news.google.com/?edchanged=1&ned=de&authuser=0 [google.com].
As for threat of removing from the index, big fucking deal. The bulk of what such online journal get is daily ad impression due to recurring visitor. What they see is the industry as a whole would get more recurring visitor if google news do not exists.