German Government Wants Google To Pay For the Right To Link To News Sites 186
First time accepted submitter presroi writes "Al Jazeera is reporting on the current state of plans by the German government to amend the national copyright law. The so-called 'Leistungsschutzrecht' (neighboring right) for publishers is introducing the right for press publishers to demand financial compensation if a company such as Google wants to link to their web site. Since the New York Times reported on this issue in March this year, two draft bills have been released by the Minister of Justice and have triggered strong criticism from the entire political spectrum in Germany, companies and activist bloggers.(Full disclosure: I am being quoted by Al Jazeera in this article)"
Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Those previews are like movie trailers. If you can't get interested by the movie trailers, no one will get you to watch the movie then, protecting revenue be pissed.
The case roots somewhat deeper. The Perlentaucher [perlentaucher.de] ("pearl diver") site was compiling links to interesting articles and providing excerpts from them, and got sued for copyright infringment because the excerpts were too verbose for some of the original publishers. Perlentaucher prevailed, the courts found the excerpts to be within the "quoting" limits. So now the publishers want to get compensated for those excerpts, especially if they are automatically generated like Google's link results.
Re:This again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Interesting)
But users who don't find anything of interest in the article are supposed to click on the ads, which the news site put on the page. Every time a user doesn't go to the article because it isn't interesting, the news site is losing ad revenue. I don't know if they think they were entitled to that ad revenue in the first place, but I'm sure they can find a way to argue, that they were.
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope this new law sets a fixed, mandatory price for Google to pay per link.
That way they can't back down or renegotiate with Google when they see how stupid they've been.
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly. They want Google to pay them for providing the service of indexing your site. I want construction workers to pay me to build a deck on my house. Funny thing is the construction workers want ME to pay THEM. Crazy, isn't it?
Google will just de-list them and, since nobody remembers bookmarks or URLs, Al-Jazeera and CBSNews will be swiftly forgotten and sent to the hell of bankruptcy. Google can't de-list, say, MSN, since Microsoft is a competitor and Google has a monopoly; however if MSN demands Google pay $1 per search result, Google can refuse to pay and then be compliant with copyright demands by de-listing them. Further, Google could then refuse to ever re-list MSN ever again; and a court would have to then order Google to list them, but it would be extremely difficult because MSN initiated the "take me off your list" call and how are we going to accuse Google of abusing their monopoly now? What's your argument? Google is being abusive by declining to take advantage of a special offer to utilize a competitor's product for free?
robots.txt (Score:4, Interesting)
Any news site not wanting a search engine linking to them need no legislation. All they need to do is create a file called robots.txt in the root folder of their site with the following content:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will ensure said news site is never seen by anyone. The choice is yours and under your full control.