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."
Yea Google! (Score:3)
Seriously, Germany's copyright views should be canned by anyone willing to take up the fight.
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.
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This law is unreasonable, but it's still hard to have sympathy for the largest for-hire propaganda organization on earth...
Even if that were true (its not), what does this have to do with the main thread?
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He's trying to demonize the victim.
It's the usual tactic for getting these kinds of laws passed.
This isn't just restricted to Germany or copyright laws. The same rationale was used to pass RICO. Except now it's as likely to be applied to a Slashdotter as it is to one of the Corleones.
Re:Yea Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Edison being a jerk is why the American film industry is in California.
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.
Re:Just remove it from Google's DB (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Even better, Google could charge them to host the excerpts.
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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."
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They won't come crawling back to Google. They will crawl to their legislators to mandate that Google include them its index, thus forcing Google to index them AND pay money to do it.
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I thought Google was the one that went *crawliing [wikipedia.org]*
Tee-hee.
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.
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This isn't about search, it is about Google News including snippets of articles on its home page. They are saying that Google has built a web portal full of content that brings in ad revenue, but does not pay for the content. Okay, some people click through, but the snippets are enough for a large number of viewers.
They seem to be fine with a couple of sentences being included in search results.
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Which is kind of odd. I've never used that screen. I only go to Google News to search for news I already know about. And then the snippets help me decide which article I want to read on the subject. Just because someone can be aware of relevant news by glancing at the news home page doesn't really mean anything of value was lost. Even if something of value was gained by the reader.
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All that would prove is that Google is fickle and could delist anyone at any time hence devaluing their search engine in the eyes of the users. They do not dare, or even consider (I'd imagine), to do this. They are the most vendor neutral search engine and have shown that time and again. Any change on that stance would adversely affect Google's popularity.
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Just because they aren't doing it out of pure altruism doesn't mean you have to write a law banning doing it - and blocking altruistic versions as a result.
But they're "losing" money from people who would have never been a reader in the first place. No money is made from a person reading the headline, and the headline or idea of the headline is just as likely to spread by word of mouth or by Twitter. And word of mouth won't even have a link to the full article.
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.
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Since the newspaper's sites are all about eyeballs for ad revenue, I guess not.
robots.txt is opt-out (Score:2)
Robots.txt is opt-out - I thought we liked opt-out rather than opt-in.
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Normally, yes. However, given the nature of the web, publishing content that has no password on it is in itself an opt-in. The web is for things you want seen. For those few cases where that is not the intent (and it really is a minuscule percentage), robots.txt may be used to clarify your position. At one time, robots.txt WAS opt-in but too many of that vast majority who wanted to be in the search engines didn't know about it and wondered why they were never spidered.
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They shouldn't remove it entirely.
They should display the name of the newspaper/site and put a huge black bar over the content.
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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).
That sounds obvious, but it isn't really clearly whether that's the case. Here in Brazil major newspapers blocked Google News and the result was a 5% drop in absolute traffic for them, but a net increase in revenue since the remaining 95% accesses are by people who manually go to their sites and then stay a while around, resulting in LOTS more ads displayed. Now, this might be a cultural peculiarity, some special way in which Brazilian Internet users relate with newspapers that differs from other countries.
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Do you have a citation on that? I found a plenty of mentions for 5% traffic drop, but nothing about revenue increase.
Nope, sorry. I searched now but couldn't find any. What I actually found were mentions to the fact Google News wasn't helping newspapers to grow their audience, and not, as I (most certainly incorrectly) remembered, that leaving caused revenue to grow. I guess nothing on resulting revenue has been published yet.
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The controversy seems to be about the little snippets. Google could handle that by removing the snippets from German sources while still listing them by headline only. It would be perfectly legal and nondiscriminatory, and would hurt German news sources a lot more than it would hurt Google.
oh, the CDU/CSU taking up a backwards position (Score:5, Funny)
This is truly a surprising development!
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ROTFL... Yes I am a German!
good job (Score:1)
I geuss this will mean Google wont be indexing these sites... Therefore the articles wont be on G and therefor their articles can be used by someone else without any duplicate content penalty from Google. This is going to bite the germans in the ass.
Let 'em (Score:2)
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Exactly. And I know what's coming next: after their page views have dropped to the bottom, they propose a new law. "Google ... erhm ... 'monopolists' will be forced to crawl each (newspaper) website. Not doing so and/or excluding them from their search index is an abuse of their dominating market position."
Broken example by them (Score:1)
People can already charge for excerpts by putting their content behind a paywall.
In fact, even that one newspaper who did actually got a decent sustainable profit by putting said content behind a paywall, despite concerns.
If the price is right, people will pay for content.
The free web is just more convenient for most people, it isn't the only solution. Never has been.
Having a bill created for it seems redundant and even potentially abusive.
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But this forces users to pay twice: once for the use of Google, now that they'll charge per search; and once to view the full article after reading the abstract on the publisher's site! You don't want the publishers to earn money twice!?
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Not really. We have a free market in the EU - Google are perfectly at liberty to set up their European offices in another EU country, which is perfectly okay from an invoicing perspective (either as a customer of or supplier to Google), but might be rather awkward for a publisher wanting to charge them.
Re:Broken example by them (Score:4, Insightful)
The website are also perfectly free to use robots.txt
No need for this law.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Oh, the middle men understand the internet just fine. Just like buggy whip manufacturers, after the first time they seen and used a gas pedal on a car.
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FYI gas pedals were a relatively late innovation. Early cars had throttle pulls on the dash (kind of like a choke pull). Foot throttles were add-ons for early Model Ts. Back then you had to have deep knowledge of your car, just to get up a long hill (gravity feed fuel, you backed up the hill).
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Another option was a rotatable lever on the steering wheel. However, foot pedal operated throttles were already in use by at least 1923 - I've driven an Austin 7 of that year with such.
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I've found tonnes of books I would never have known about otherwise,
Really? What kinds of books? I'm always on the look out for interesting books, if you have any ideas.
Just stop indexing them (Score:2)
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Google, Bing, Yahoo et.al. should just stop indexing German news sites. Let's see what happens to news revenue when that happens.
German news sites sue Google and Bing (whoe really uses Yahoo anymore...) for damages in German courts and wins huge sums?
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
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You assume German courts would be reasonable. If they're anything like German politicians, they won't be.
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If there is no right to fair use, then all indexing is per-se illegal, and search providers pulling out of any and all indexing of publishers that sue it is justified.
There are battles worth fighting and battles against one's own feet with a loaded Uzi on automatic fire. The publishers have extra bullets just to make sure.
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BMO
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Germany has no "Fair Use Right" as in the U.S. sense of it. However, we got something you might translate as "Citation Right", that is: you're allowed to cite a certain amount of a published (and copyrighted) work without infringing on any copyright. The debate therefore is often "how much is a reasonable amount". Clearly "citing" whole articles wouldn't be assumed reasonable.
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>However, we got something you might translate as "Citation Right", that is: you're allowed to cite a certain amount of a published (and copyrighted) work without infringing on any copyright. The debate therefore is often "how much is a reasonable amount". Clearly "citing" whole articles wouldn't be assumed reasonable.
Just so you know this is part of what we in the US consider fair use.
Tack on parody and whatnot and you have the full definition of fair use in the US.
Fair use in the US does not mean copyi
Re:Just stop indexing them (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
Yes Google should do that, thereby totally abusing their near monoly position on the search market in an attempt to blackmail a nation state into legislating in a way that suits Google an action which is guaranteed to instantly get the undivided attention of the EU commission (the same one who handed Microsoft a record $1,4 billon fine).
So in your opinion, Google should be forced to index all of these German publishers and pay for the privilege of having to do this?
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I liked the other idea, hire a bunch of blokes to train the AI about German sights. It will be incomprehensible.
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and by indexing more material, becomes a viable competitor to Google, Bing and Yahoo in Germany.
Hardly.
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that would be abusing the search ~monopoly for a different business.
there are two separate businesses here
1) google search (newspapers want to be in this, but possibly don't want snippets showing)
2) google news (newspapers want payment for snippets in this)
at the moment, they can opt out of 1, or 2 independently using robots.txt
if they switch to demanding payment for #2, then google should just de-list them from #2 until they pay an advertising fee (which is coincidentally equal to the government mandated c
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What if Google used the justification that a publisher had demanded removal of excerpts, so Google has responded by removing those excerpts and corresponding links from all *.google.de sites?
If you can't link a sentence without paying for it, then you can't include it in search results either.
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> If you can't link a sentence without paying for it, then you can't include it in search results either.
sure you can.
Google searches my entire site - but they definitely do not have permission to take all my content and reproduce it on their new site for supporting their remote control apps. Similarly with use of the news stories, there is a reasonable debate to be had about what constitutes fair use.
The newspapers are arguing (quite reasonably) that Google News (where summaries of news stories are pres
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Did you look at Google News? Your "quite reasonably" and "essentially a newspaper" tell me that you didn't.
Snippets there are no longer than on general search and generally useless for any other purpose than ascertaining the topic of article.
It's literally two and a half first sentences. I doubt there are many news articles that tell you everything you need in two intro sentences.
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]
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Or maybe the newspapers will make their own search engine, better than Google, and Google will be left out.
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judging by the average newspapers site i think not. Most are 90% adds poorly laid out content that often don't render well(overlaping) and try to direct you to dead tree versions. i am surprised that they can set up a lamp server in most cases.
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They can't even do the one thing they're supposed to do - publish news - decently, unless you count celebrity X kisses celebrity Y's ass as news. how on earth can you think they can bring out a *better* search engine than Google's?
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Something worse than fuck will happen. The propaganda, er news agencies of the Chinese, Russian, Iranian governments, or some fringe extremist group will take up the slack. They will be more than happy to supply "freely" indexable censored news.
robots.txt -- yet again (Score:2)
The supreme stupidity here is that a law is not needed. If the sites don't want to be indexed, it's dead simple to set up robots.txt [robotstxt.org] to keep out Google and the others. But that's been pointed out thousands of times by now. So if they
The key word is "would" (Score:2)
Every once in a great while I'll get what I need form the summary of that page (ex. definition, reference), but the other 99.5% I click the link and go to the page like I normally would & I don't think my googling habits are unique in any way, so this type of law would make websites have to adapt... more descriptive page headers & titles for starters, or... they can just
Google needs to work with other engines (Score:2)
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No, because then that would be collusion, and could end up with nasty things like the government mandating the search engines pay newspapers to "license" their content.
Just leave it to the free market. The search engines which want to pay the newspapers to index them can. The search engines which don't won't. If the newspaper content is as valuable to search engine users as t
Another way to fight (Score:2)
Search companies should charge them for indexing (Score:4, Funny)
Then Google, Bing, etc can compete with each others for lower rate. After a while, one, and soon after that, all of them will offer free listing, and those CEO will jump with joy (we didn't have to pay for it anymore, yeh!!)
Problem solved.
Search results? (Score:2)
Is this about search results? Most similar laws in the past have been about Google News (and similar services from other search engines). If they're asking to charge for search context, then sure they're shooting themselves in the foot - I don't know about you, but I hate results with no context. If they're trying to shut down Google News https://news.google.com/ [google.com] then it's a slightly different story ... only slightly though, Google does only include snippets there too.
All parties youth organisations say it is stupid (Score:2)
What's rather funny is, that all partie's (CDU/CSU/SPD/GREENS/LIBERALS/PIRATES) youth organisations said in a joint statement (the Left was left out, but they say the same), that the law is stupid.
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 thre
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There is something wrong with this argument but my mind won't tell me what it is. Why do the publishers think people like you should read the full article if you are perfectly happy to read only an excerpt? In fact why don't the publishers save time by only publishing the excerpt (since people don't bother with the full article.) Of course Google would not able to show you this excerpt so instead would have to display a link to "mystery news".
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Because there are a lot of people like me which simply look at google new, read the exerpt, and don't bother with the full article.
That means the full article has no value. That's the Publisher's biggest problem, not competition from Google News type services.
as opposed to... (Score:2)
As opposed to... the German press and publishers, who have been abusing their position to misinform and manipulate public opinion for their own financial gain for decades.