
Google launches “Defend Your Net” campaign in Germany against copyright plans - iProject
http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/27/google-launches-defend-your-network-campaign-in-germany-to-protest-planned-copyright-laws/?fromcat=all
======
piokoch
I can't stand "professional journalism" like that. First sentence "For Google,
what is happening in Germany right now is a very big issue. If the German
Bundestag (government) gets its way".

Budnestag is German parliament, not government. This would be clear, if the
author made an effort and read article's snippet, which is cited in his/her
own article:

"Later this month a proposed new section to the German Copyright Act is due to
be discussed in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. "

Comming back to merit. I am not specialist, but this legislation is not that
stupid as it may sound.

It gives content providers a chance to earn money in other way then putting
ads on their websites - ads are good for Google, but not for us because of
privacy violation, user tracking and similar practices. Collected data are
available on request for FBI, CIA and similar agencies in other countries.

Right now "content aggregators" take for free what they want, as a result
those, who provide valuable content are loosing money.

This hits society, since professional journalism is in the decline. We get
mostly gossips, unchecked revelation, stupid interpretation of scientific
results or advertisers-driven content.

If nobody is able to finance investigative journalism, then it is clear danger
for freedom.

On the other hand this regulation does not hit education, general access to
knowladge, since content is protected only for a year.

~~~
Dylan16807
With 'government' this is an issue of regional dialect, not a mistake in the
article. I only learned very recently that there are two interpretations of
the term. It looks like to you 'government' means the executive body that
enforces laws. But to the writer of this article, and I think to most of the
US, 'government' includes the entirety of executive, legislative, and
judicial.

(At least I think that's your complaint, and not a nitpick of how they
explained that Bundestag is an official body.)

Back to the merit of the legislation. Google is only using headlines and tiny
snippets. They aren't copying articles. They aren't doing any harm to
investigative journalism. All they do is point people at what they were
searching for. It's not their responsibility to help the newspapers if the
newspapers are having trouble. Google's already linking to them.

------
jacquesm
The day that google allows its search results to be scraped is the day that
I'll be rooting for them in battles like this.

There is quite a bit of hypocrisy in demanding access to the product of a
large number of individuals and corporations in an automated way while denying
others access to the derivative of those products.

    
    
      > http http://www.google.com/robots.txt
      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /search

~~~
Xylakant
The issue is a different one. Google does not _demand_ access to news portals,
the publishers grant it. If they would not like to appear in the google
search, a single entry in the robots.txt would take care of that. However,
since google does send them a lot of traffic, publishers actually want to
appear as far up in the listing as possible and spend ridiculous amounts of
money on SEO. However, now that newspaper publishers have problems monetizing,
they turn to the state, point to google and cry "they are making money with
our content, we want a share." while forgetting that google provides a service
of its own: Google does compile and serve the index, and for that, they take
money. They do not serve newspaper pages to the reader or create content.

I have no special feelings for google, but making a law that requires search
engine providers to strike a separate contract with any publishing entity
whose contents they want to list would hardly be beneficial to any side. It's
just that most german publishing houses are too blind to see. They're like a
wounded elephant in a porcelain store: Unable to clearly see what damage
they're causing to the surrounding world.

~~~
jacquesm
"they are making money with our content, we want a share."

And rightly so. Google controls the way people surf the web, as a monopolist
they will be hit with regulation like this more frequently. The homepage of
those newspapers used to be the main avenue to get to the content rather than
search.

Please note that I'm against such legislation, I just feel that Google is
operating on a principle of asymmetry and uses its monopoly position to
control an ever larger amount of the content on the web and access to that
content without wanting to reciprocate by releasing their own content in a
similar manner. Until they do I think they don't deserve our pity or support.

It's all take and very little give. I can't fault them for doing that as long
as they can get away with it but they really don't deserve to harness public
opinion against the legislators that attempt to reduce the strength of the
monopoly position.

~~~
Xylakant
> And rightly so

Wrong: Google (or Bing or Duckduckgo) is not making money off their content.
Google is making money off the index they compile, of the service they offer
above and beyond what the publishing houses offer. Nobody wants to go to each
newspaper page and see what they write about a specific topic. Now, the
publishing houses could agree and build their own index, shut google out and
be done with it. They'd even have a much better starting point to do so since
they have vastly more information about the content they server. But they
don't. Quite to the contrary, they try to shut down services that provide such
a service (Perlentaucher springs to my mind here).

It's not about pity and support for google either. There is a monopoly on the
other side as well: Most publishing houses are pro this legislation, so you
read very little against the proposed law in major publications. It's good
that a corporate player now takes up the flag to counterbalance for that -
even if it's google.

The proposed law is poorly worded and poorly targeted, it will endanger
bloggers who cite from newspaper publications, even linking the headline on
facebook may open you up to a lawsuit. It would practically require all
bloggers to go back through their blogs and strike all mention of newspaper
articles from past articles. So even if I could somehow accept that the
publishing houses should be awarded some of googles earnings - in this case
I'd have to join their flag. But if you can't rally behind a good cause just
because "google deserves a slap on it head", then rally behind IGEL [1] which
is the (bloggers) initiative against the proposed law.

[1] <http://leistungsschutzrecht.info/>

~~~
hef19898
Again the important difference between what a law is INTENDED to be and how it
actually USED. And while I see at least some truth in the very basic idea of
the leistungsschutzrecht, I also see the potential of using it ways that are
very different from the basic idea of helping content creators, especially
since it's the very same people who now support that law that used to support
ACTA et al..

For me this law is there to protect printed newspapers from the evil internet
thing (including small web-only publishers and bloggers). That it's supported
by all big german media and publishing houses isn't a coincidence. But in the
end it won't help them, since from my point of view the print crisis in
Germany is to no small also caused by poor journalism and an unability to
create new revenue streams as it is by the "internet" per se.

A further risk, and you can actually call me a little bit of a tin foil hat if
you want, you ahve a nice little law in place that can actually be used to
suppres inconvinient information. Add all the other laws already in place that
are used to hunt movie pirates and file sharers and the Stasi or Gestapo would
have cut their right arm of to have equal opportunities to isurvaill and
influence the public.

And the forth power in a democracry, the press, is actually promoting things
like that just because they are to lacy and stupid to protect their bottom
line in a different way.

Do I mean to support Google? No, because Google can also be pretty harsh when
profits are concerned but for now Google is the lesser evil. Maybe in 10 years
from now there wil be initiatives targeting Google inspired legislations who
nows. But right now, the leistungsschutzrecht is like burning down the house
in order to prevent from being maybe flooded some day. And not liking the guy
who want's to do something about it isn't, IMHO, a good reason to just stand
by and watch it happen.

------
rickmb
I don't like this legislation, or any other legislation that increases
copyright restrictions (especially in favor of clueless dinosaurs), but I also
resent the hypocritical way in which Google pretends it's protesting this as a
public service.

Google is only interested in what makes money for Google, and it has lost any
credibility when it comes to looking out for the public's interest (or "do no
evil" in general) a long time ago.

Their campaign should be called "Defend our profit margins", Google is no
better than the publishers pushing in favor of this legislation, their
interest just accidentally happen to coincide with ours.

~~~
mseebach
That's how you get stuff done. You build a coalition of people whose goals, if
not necessarily pure motivations, align with yours. It's not like you're going
to get "I support everything Google does, now and forever" tattooed on your
forehead because you align with them on this issue.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

~~~
meric
Or not even goals. Two parties vote against a tax-reform package - one voted
against because it disagreed with increased mining taxes and the other voted
against because the increased mining taxes was too low.

[http://www.news.com.au/top-stories/greens-and-coalition-
dump...](http://www.news.com.au/top-stories/greens-and-coalition-dump-tax-
break/story-e6frfkp9-1226298667219)

~~~
mseebach
It's really splitting hairs, but I'd argue that's a commonality of goal
(rejecting tax increase), but difference of motivation (too much/not enough).
Love the example, though. Politics makes strange bed fellows.

------
dexen

        GET /news.html HTTP/1.1
        User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
    
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    

vs.

    
    
        GET /news.html HTTP/1.1
        User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
    
        HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

~~~
dbaupp
I'm probably just missing the context of the discussion, but what does this
mean & what's its significance?

~~~
sek
If they don't want to be crawled, they could just change the robots.txt. But
nobody does.

~~~
dagw
Almost nobody:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/oct/22/googl...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/oct/22/google-
brazil)

I'm looking forward to see in a years time what the result of this little
experiment is.

------
yaix
Could somebody explain why those news publishers don't just deny the Googlebot
access to their content? Why create another vague law, as if we don't already
have enough of those in Germany.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Because then those publishers wouldn't be on Google!

...it's silly, but this is what happens when publishers don't understand the
Internet.

------
groby_b
Somebody remind me again why either robots.txt or serving a 402/Payment
required to crawler UAs doesn't work?

~~~
fforw
Because the publishers want their cake and eat it. They want to be found by
Google, but Google should pay them for it. Because they're awesome and the
protectors of culture and everything good and right.

------
flyinglizard
I'm quite amused at Google showing the bureaucrats the limits of power. In the
long term, we may be replacing one devil with another; but for the time being,
Google has done good.

------
Ntrails
What stops google from simply refusing to crawl sites that want money for
appearing in search results?

------
aszantu
there's no e-petition for that. If there's one and I didn't find it please add
a link

~~~
schabernakk
[https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/petitionen/_2012/_08/_16/Pe...](https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/petitionen/_2012/_08/_16/Petition_35009.$$$.a.u.html)

the petition is currently pending but it seems they didnt reach enough people.

