German Copyright Bill Would Let Publishers Charge Search Engines For Excerpts

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."

Re:Just remove it from Google's DB

[Fluffeh]

And that's what is going to happen. And maybe after a few months of web stats crashing

No, no-one is going to want to point out that the laws that they argued for so heavily will be their demise. They will find some other scapegoat and quietly ask that the laws be retracted - or make behind the scenes "agreements" with the likes of Google to publish the snippets.

Re:Just stop indexing them

[viperidaenz]

They should go a step further. Stop indexing all German news sites and charge a fee to those who want their articles in the search indexes, since it is additional overhead for Google to make exceptions for them.

Re:Yea Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about sympathy for google. It's about the government supporting entrenched failing business models over newer ones that will replace them. This isn't about google at all. It's about rights. Do you think the government is providing exceptions for Bing and Baidu? Well, maybe for Baidu. I can't see the Chinese government taking any German claims seriously...