
Something really scary is going on in Germany - gorm
http://martinweigert.com/something-really-scary-is-going-on-in-germany/
======
durbin
Belgian papers sued Google a few years ago over similar uses of their content.
It sort of backfired on them when google stopped crawling their pages. The
internet and Google are more powerful than the German print media.
[http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-
papers-a...](http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-anger-
at-google-move/)

~~~
sliverstorm
What a great article. So brief, yet so much justice.

Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.

~~~
alex_c
>so much justice

I suggest the "careful what you wish for" lesson applies both ways. "Justice"
implies that Google can and should get away with a lot of things under threat
of removing your content from their index.

~~~
slurgfest
Since Germany is a populous and wealthy country, Google has a strong
commercial interest in not removing German content. It's hard to imagine what
nefarious thing Google would force Germany to do this way.

~~~
walshemj
why there are other Publishers that will step in to fill the gap New Scientist
has just launched a German language site for example.

------
schabernakk
To be fair, there were a few positive/neutral articles, for example by Frank
Rieger, a popular member of the Chaos Computer Club, in the FAZ (Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung) but they are in the minority.

Of course, there is the obvious ignorance regarding technical facts like:
"robots.txt is from the stone age. On or off for everyone is the only
possibility" [1] which reminds me a lot of the discussion we had some time
back regarding internet filters. But the one thing I find really dangerous is
that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the
story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working
journalists. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their
commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did
their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google
and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being
sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open
and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they
link to news articles is almost never mentioned.

One last thing: Recently, two big news newspapers had to shut down and that
print sales are declining is nothing new. I cant remember the last time I
bought a newspaper and I am also pretty sure that although
blogs/twitter/whatever are a good addition they cant replace classical media.
There is definately a need for the discussion for new sources of incomes for
classical paper based medias as ad sales from their online publication wont
cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently
have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know,
but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go.

[1][http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-
vergl...](http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergleicht-
google-mit-den-taliban-1212-96172.html)

~~~
leoh
"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major
newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative
is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists."

Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem
if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German
public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are
necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now
since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past --
research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some
articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals
overseas.

What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form
-- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that
should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the
RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of
abstracts) may also be unfair.

I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out
people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and
then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been
possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the
advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and
hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality
of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good
articles would have likely declined.

Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very
small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts
were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google
for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if
newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link
is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I
think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.

~~~
magicalist
_the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some
newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an
article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the
value an article link is to Google?_

I don't understand the distinction you are making between these two
situations.

Think about the larger precedent that you're setting here, however. Should I
not be able to quote a few lines and link you to a news story without paying
money to the source I'm linking to? (whether the license was compulsory or
not). What is google news but a factual stating of "here's what a bunch of
sources said about the news today"? If a major event happens in your home
town, how much money will it cost you to put up a blog post saying, "here's a
roundup of coverage on this event"?

~~~
peterhost
Just for the record, French laws about "droits d'auteurs" and quotations allow
you to quote any text under "droits d'auteur" as long as it remains a
quotation (the definition of which is vague, and varies from one case of
"jurisprudence" to another, but 300 words is generally considered reasonable)

This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you,
there's "quote" and there's "quote".

------
netcan
I'm very disappointed with Europe. There is a trend of idiotic legislation
drafted, & voted on by people who don't really understand the implications.
They just don't understand the internet & technology enough and/or aren't
smart enough. It' embarrassing.

The other recent example was/is the brain-dead UK/EU cookie law. Is our
privacy any more protected? No. All we got was some dumb generic "cookie
policy" popups that we have to "agree" to and further balkanization of the
web. Additional costs to having a website (are there any scaremongering
companies offering auditing to make sure your website does not expose you to
legal risk?). Disempowering people by raising the barrier to running a site.

All downside. No upside from any perspective. We can't even blame lobbies or
interested parties because literally nobody got anything positive from this.
Just pure stupidity.

They should have know better than this.

~~~
digeridoo
Not all bad. [http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-
neu...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neutrality-
law-passes-senate)

~~~
netcan
Thanks. It's relevant though that nothing like this is likely to come from the
EU itself.

------
morsch
Step 1: Make Google pay for including you in search results.

Step 2: Force Google to include you by demanding something like search engine
neutrality.

~~~
zmmmmm
Step 3: Google requires payment from German publishers to be included in the
search index, exactly offsetting fees incurred in Step 1. It would be quite
reasonable, I think.

~~~
ajuc
Step 4. Only commercial sites from Germany are in Google, cause it's too much
paperwork to have all these fees canceled if you're not doing this full time.

Both Google and newspapers in Germany are glad from such resolution, only some
naive young people complain about something. They're surely pirates.

------
sdoering
As this site is nearly down, I add my thoughts as a comment here as well:

Well, some media (FAZ) did a pretty good job, letting Frank Rieger explain the
"Leistungsschutzrecht". OK, even there, it was one article of many. And only
one.

And what is new, when it comes to the press not publishing anything, that goes
against their own agenda. Even across a lot of publishing-houses. Well nothing
new under the sun.

What is really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that
everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is
so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there
might be a reason for this.

Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical
questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left
for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if
these voices are silenced through fear...

... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like
conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth,
but I just wanted to share the thought.

Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of
content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as
being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the
discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.

~~~
LinXitoW
Some have argued that even just linking to an article might get you sued.
After all, most URLs include the title of the article. Obviously, courts will
have to decide, but the possibility alone is frightening.

~~~
sdoering
Some years ago here in Germany there has been an court sentence, that a link
is no infringement. >The publishers wanted to kill Google News in this way.

Some years before that a friend of mine had written a news search engine, that
did exactly the same as Google News, but he did not have the money to fight
before court. So he had to remove a lot of publishers from his index.

So I do not think, that linking will become a problem here - but who knows.
But the real problem is, that this law might silence independent bloggers. And
it was them, who brought important topics into the public discussions, that
were ignored by the big publishers, like a planned web-censorship law, that
was discussed some years back...

------
lenni
FWIW, I've written to my member of parliament [0], expressed my
dissatisfaction and asked him to oppose the law. He wrote back saying hat his
parliamentary party is already opposing this law but for slightly different
reasons: It won't increase the quality of journalism and will just create a
flood of lawsuits. Lastly it is far too vaguely phrased as to not have grave
side effects.

The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative
majority the parliament.

Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was
a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by
said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ...").

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele>

~~~
bijant
fuck ströbele ! he voted in favor of the war in afghanistan and yet he still
participates in all the peace rallies. He's just another lying corrupted
politician

------
mtgx
This is why Germans must vote for Pirate Party at the next elections.

Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this
will affect them as well.

~~~
schabernakk
I would really like to like the pirate party but in their current state they
are absolutely unvotable for me. This is one of their core topics but I havent
heard anything from them yet. What I have heard is that the youth
organizations of almost every party (yeah I know, including the young pirates)
have voiced their concerns regardings the lsr.

~~~
mtgx
That does seem strange. Any idea what is happening to them? Are they going
through leadership change inside the party or policy change, since that last
scandal with one of their female leaders?

~~~
schabernakk
People closer to the pirate party might disagree, but from my outside
perspective it has much to do with procedural problems the very nature of the
party brings with them. They are primarily concerned with themselves. Lets
take flat hierarchy goal for example: A good thing in theory which leads to a
very tiring process when it comes to making decisions.

On the last big conference for example there was a last minute petition for
the further research of time travel. And it has to be discussed. Sure, it was
dismissed relatively quickly and it was meant as a joke but those were 30
minutes lost for good.

Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, they are missing
likable leading figures (a concept they dont really like). Head of the pirates
Bernd Schloemer for example is more of a silent leader. One of the most famous
pirates Christoph Lauer comes across as rude, uninterested and smug. A social
behaviour 101 wouldnt be that bad for some of the members.

~~~
bijant
the pirate party certainly has some procedural problems. they would probably
be the first to admit just that. But those problems stem from the fact, that
they are trying to implement completly new procedures for political
assemblies. procedures that take advantage of modern technology instead of
just replicating an essentialy unchanged process from the 18th century. And if
they should succeed, it could redefine democracy.

------
danmaz74
I'm very curious to know how they would determine how much Google should pay,
and how to distribute that money to the different publishers.

Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and
stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still
Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).

~~~
schabernakk
Just because they share the same language doesnt mean the journalistic quality
regarding local/national news is equal.

A german newspaper will always be more detailed and in-depth when it comes to
national matters.

~~~
danmaz74
Of course the quality and quantity of German news on Google would worsen, but
the point would be to see if it is Google benefiting more from the newspapers,
or the other way around.

~~~
schabernakk
It would be interesting to see an official statistic from the big papers where
they get their traffic from. I get my news by surfing directly to their
homepages. I think I read somewhere that they get most of their hits through
the google search although I cant really belive that.

~~~
jfoutz
I would imagine the bulk of traffic comes from headline news. Some people
check the paper every day, some people catch a bit of news on the bus or TV or
whatever, then google it.

I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people
trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been
pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that
traffic comes from google.

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting and sad. I don't know if it is possible but I am wondering if such
a law could include an 'opt out' policy. Something which said to search
engines and the like that they are allowed to snippet your articles.

Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out
enabled.

My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the
ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out"
group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this
scheme was a "good" idea.

~~~
sorich87
robots.txt ?

~~~
schabernakk
yes. They dont want to block google or other crawlers. They still want their
traffic, but they also want to get paid for getting crawled and listed.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well I can only read English transcribed interpretations so perhaps a native
German speaker can correct me.

As I understand it this is their argument:

Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google
displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the
headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has
advertisements on the page.

Now, as I understand their argument, The publishers claim Google makes money
off someone who clicks on an advertisement on these 'constructed' pages.
Google's news page is full of headlines and snippets that came from other
publications. Google doesn't pay those publications, but the only "reason"
that someone is reading the news page in the first place is because those
headlines and snippets are on that page. Therefore Google should either share
any revenue they got from the ad click with the people whose 'content' was on
the page, or they should pre-pay for that content in the first place.

Does that seem like it captures it? If you agree that it does, then we can
speculate that the publishers lobbying for this 'law' believe that in this
economic transaction Google is getting a better deal than they are.

Except that they conveniently _ignore_ the economic benefit they are getting
from Google for telling the world that their web site has interesting content
(or at least content related to the news interest or search interest of the
web searcher).

Presumably these publishers make income either through sales or advertising on
their web site. And those sales are proportional to the traffic at their web
site. Google _could_ charge to include them in their search/news results (and
they in fact do that in search with AdWords) and would it be more or less than
the papers would charge to use a snippet?

The easiest way to educate a publisher on the value of having their results
appear in Google is to stop having them appear in Google. Ask any web site
that was knocked off the first page by the Panda update how that feels. Those
guys really "get" the value they receive by being up there. Publishers don't
get that yet. (well not all of them). So Google stops indexing them. Their
traffic goes back to pre-1995 levels (which means nobody goes there) and their
internet costs (hosting, etc) now exceed the revenue from online advertising.
Whoops! Education achieved.

Of course I could be totally off base here, there could be some moral argument
I'm missing but frankly I think its all about the money here and not all of
the 'value' is accounted for.

~~~
a_bonobo
You get it right, from the parts of the debate I followed this is their main
argument - "they display extracts of our texts, and people then don't visit
our page but stay on Google News", which is of course unprovable.

(you could get the amount of people clicking through by stopping to list these
snippets - the visitors you loose are the visitors that used to click through)

Another thing to add is: Google runs no ads on Google News, so _directly_ they
don't make any money using other people's news (indirectly by binding
customers etc.)

~~~
fforw
In addition: Google has no ads on the google news pages.

------
api
If they succeed they will simply remove themselves from the discourse and
accelerate their obsolescence.

~~~
Tichy
Sure, and I would welcome that. But I think smaller publishers (including
bloggers) might have problems, too. The law would apply to their blogs as
well, they would have to figure out how to allow Google and others to still
quote them. It might be so complicated that it would cause a lot of blogs to
shut down.

Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that
it would make it too costly to experiment and would kill small publishers.

~~~
jamesjporter
Would it work to just put your blog under a permissive distribution license
(Creative Commons or the like)? I know nothing about the German legal system
or the exact phrasing of this law; could someone with more domain knowledge
comment on how this would interact with licensing terms?

~~~
Tichy
I don't know the exact phrasing either. Also not sure if everybody wants to
put their content under CC.

I think the government could make this messy enough to even foil the CC plan.
For example they could set it up like GEMA for music - there would be an
entity distributing the money and collecting it on behalf of the content
providers. Besides, is there a standard way yet to announce CC content? That
would be necessary to make it work for search engines.

~~~
atuttle
AFAIK this is the way to go: <http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works>

------
css771
Why is it that every time that something like this happens, Google is the only
tech company that comes forward with a message? Doesn't having a free and open
internet benefit any other company?

~~~
bowyakka
I feel that its because google is of a size where the idea of getting a letter
from its lawyers is a scary prospect.

------
jhund
The bigger trend to this story is that information changed from something that
was scarce to something that is now abundant.

What the German publishers don't seem to understand is that their once so
valuable and scarce goods (information and news) are becoming less and less
valuable. Looks like they are trying to defend a dying business model with
legislation.

Herbert Simon said in the 70s: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention.” Google is a major dispenser of attention, and I think the German
publishers are doing themselves a huge disservice by making it harder for
Google to send attention to the publishers.

The big unresolved issue is: how can we finance good journalism in an era
where the value of static information approximates zero very quickly? Maybe
the answer is in moving away from static information to an information process
as the product... Something that can't be copied easily.

~~~
richardjordan
Exactly right. I made a similar point here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886376>

Media companies are in the attention harvesting business NOT in the
information delivery business. The marginal value of the information product
is virtually zero. The marginal value of attention redirected to ads is some
rate greater than zero - some rate greater than the cost of delivering that
information product. So profit can be made. But the power is in delivering the
attention, not the information.

------
neumann_alfred
From the first comment on that:

 _"What’s wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce?
No one has to use their headlines if they don’t want to pay for it."_

What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example.
I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I
started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy
and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read
in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I
love quotes.

Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs
left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there _is_ such a thing as fair
use in Germany... any ideas?

~~~
kibwen
In the spirit of DRY, here's a link to the a comment of mine, 200 pixels away
on this very page, answering that exact question:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289>

But I suppose I really should have refactored the comment out into a top-level
comment and linked to it from both. :)

~~~
neumann_alfred
Okay, that kinda leaves Israel since I'd never move to the US :P Thanks!

------
sherr
The Economist talked about this a week ago in an article :

"Taxing times As newspapers’ woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make
Google pay for the news it publishes"

Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the
intended consequences :

[http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...](http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspapers-
woes-grow-some-are-lobbying-politicians-make-google-pay-news-it)

------
kleiba
Frankly, I can understand the publisher's point, but I'm surprised that they
do not seem to see how this could backfire if Google simply stopped crawling
their sites.

But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my
personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left
where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a
search.

------
b1daly
I think the intuition behind these proposed laws is that Google has become so
dominant in providing the information substrate of society that it should be
subject to regulation as a monopoly. The argument would be something along the
lines that search works best when provided as one comprehensive resource.
Therefore, as a natural monopoly it should be regulated for similar reasons
that other utilities are (electricity, water). The publishers are trying to
make a case that their product has value as a "public good." Classical
economic theory says market forces alone will produce a sub-optimal supply of
a public good with out regulation.

Something like that. It's not a totally implausible argument. It does seem
notable to me that Google is able to extract value from content that the
creators can't.

------
mmariani
503\. Here's the Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://martinweigert.com/something-
really-scary-is-going-on-in-germany/)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I didn't listen much in high school English; is linking to a Google cache of
this blog post ironic?

~~~
sukuriant
No. When a site is down, it is customary on Hacker News for someone to go to
Google and get the last cached (saved) version of the web-page from them to
post it those that can't access it to read, as a sort of convenience. It's
also common for the plaintext of the article to be posted here.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I meant that it seems like precisely the sort of thing that would be outlawed
by the proposed legislation.

------
yk
IANAL but trying to read the law, it seems to be a rather blatant lex
google.[1] They specifically state "search engine or similar services" should
be prohibited from (in an extreme interpretation) linking to newspapers, if
they do not pay. ( The rest of the law is probably just redundant, since it
seems to reimplement copyright for a small subset of already copyrighted
material.)

[1]<http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf> (German)

[EDIT: spelling]

~~~
richardjordan
Google should state a new policy. We're not going to spend our money on
servers and bandwidth indexing and linking to German publishers who won't pay
- I guarantee you the value of the traffic they get from Google dwarfs what
Google gets back from them in terms of marginal revenue directly attributable
to their content. That's the thing about Google. They make tons of money - but
given that they're a prime mover of traffic around the Internet they make a
damn site more money for other folks - including newspapers.

So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with
termination fees and call it a wash.

------
hso9791
The proper term for pushing this law is "rent-seeking". You must include our
content, and you must pay us for it.

This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as
working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all
for an even better cause.

German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web
like the rest of us.

~~~
richardjordan
If the newspapers could make a profit putting pictures of cats riding unicorns
on every page with any text written in swahili, they'd do it every day it
worked for them and not give a damn about the societal benefit - they'd cry
that they're businesses and they've got to be allowed to make a profit. This
is exactly what's happened over the decades as they cut international staff,
and investigative staff and focused on lifestyle and entertainment news more
and more.

------
richardjordan
This ultimately comes down to the fact that newspapers are going out of
business because not enough people want to buy them any more, and they're
lashing out in desperation.

I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these
media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your
content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay
in two ways - direct purchasing, and delivering surplus attention beyond that
required to consume the media, which can be redirected towards various forms
of advertising. When you cannot run your business on advertising revenue alone
it means that not enough people are giving enough surplus attention of enough
value to cover.

This argument about the "inherent value" of one form of content or another -
of the need to pay artists or creators, or in this case journalists - doesn't
extend to other realms. If I decide I want to be a carpenter, I cannot build a
table and demand someone buy that table for $1,000. If the market won't bear
that price for the table then the government isn't going to force others to
pay me $1,000 because I feel that's what it's "worth".

The market rates for all forms of media have plummeted due to there being more
supply of attention-draining media than there is demand either in terms of
hard-dollars in direct payment, or surplus attention to be redirected towards
paid advertising (and its ilk).

When old media companies had a stranglehold on distribution because paper
production and distribution was expensive, or video production costs were
prohibitive, only a small elite were able to publish their opinions, and the
monopolistic distributors were able to charge a premium for the limited access
to information or entertainment they provided. They weren't paid well because
they provided an outstanding product (though it often was), they were paid
well because they limited supply. Those limits are gone. Many many people
produce entertainment and informational content. Many do it just for fun and
are happy not to get paid. Many more do it with the hope of getting paid
anything without the expectation of the lavish salaries and expense accounts
of journalists of old.

This undercuts their economics and doesn't even touch on the fact that the
newer voices often offer media that is more attractive to younger audiences.
Not to mention declining quality of the product in many cases. Many media
companies as they've become bloated monstrosities have undermined their own
product quality with short-term-profit-focused decision making which had long
term harm.

Is it really the case that piracy accounts for all problems in a record
industry where the giants spent the pre-Internet-boom '90s crushing
independent labels, monopolizing market channels and creating a modern-day
payola system on radio where programming was rigidly sliced and diced to the
lowest common denominator? Is none of the loss of popularity of the New York
Times down to their abandoning their predominantly liberal subscriber audience
during the Bush years and being guilty of mis-leading story after mis-leading
story in the build up to the Iraq War, destroying people's confidence in their
role as a reliable neutral arbiter?

tl;dr The publishers referenced by the OP aren't happy at the market rate for
their product and services and want government to rig the market to pay them a
cushy wage. Such subsidies rarely save industries in the long term, and the
public should be outraged - because legislation of this sort is a public
subsidy on a privileged elite in no uncertain terms.

~~~
netcan
I think the point that is unnoticed is that medium matters. More specifically,
medium & distribution matter.

Mediums beget business models, not content. Game Of Thrones has business model
closer to X Factor than to Avatar, because similarity of the medium is more
important than similarity of the content.

The best way to see this is by looking at the history of porn, the content
industry with negative lobbying power. Adult cinemas had the same business
model as (and competed with) live shows. Certain types of content got
produced. Then home videos changed it entirely. DDifferent types of content
got produced for different people. Then DVD + online sales, changed the
industry (growing it again). Then live streaming shrunk it.

Each time the medium & distribution changed the whole industry changed.
Different producers, different consumers, different content, different size
industry, different business model.

Online consumption of news media is not the same as dead tree. That is
reality. All of the characteristics of the industry change when that happens.
Douglas Adams said it best " _It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River,
the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean
will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no
longer apply._ "

------
R_Edward
Is there no such thing as Fair Use in German copyright law?

~~~
kibwen
_"While many other countries recognize similar exceptions to copyright, only
the United States and Israel fully recognize the concept of fair use."_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally)

~~~
dmayle
This is entirely misleading, because it makes it seem like the policies in
other countries is questionable with regards to fair use, or perhaps with
lesser rights.

In France, for example, there is no such thing as fair use, but that's only
because 'fair use' in the US is not defined as what you're allowed to do,
however, but as a sort of vague statement about perhaps being able to use
things.

In France, it is strictly codified: You are able to make private showings of
copyrighted material You are allowed to make private copies (with a few
exceptions, e.g. software backups allowed, but copying your poster so you can
hang it in two different rooms is illegal, as is copying your software to two
different computers so two different people can use it) You can make copies of
non-educational works for educational uses (ie. no photocopying textbooks, but
you can copy yesterday's newspaper article all you want) Parody Citations Etc.

------
Tichy
Isn't this a case for the internet bat signal? I must admit I still haven't
included it on my sites, mostly because last time I looked they only provided
JavaScript hooks making my site vulnerable to their site being hacked. Perhaps
they have an API by now?

------
dschiptsov
They should google ''Wyatt's Torch'' before voting.)

------
ripperdoc
Why is this topic so complicated? A Google news snippet very rarely would
suffice for a user, if they are interested they would click through, if they
are not, they would not visiting the newspaper anyway. Google are not showing
ads in Google News, although they might show them in search results. But
still, no profit that newspaper could address is being taken by Google. In
fact, Google is providing traffic.

So taking all the philosophical statements out of the way, what is the
econimical case that the newspapers are making? If Google actually showed a
bigger part or the whole articles, they'd obviously be taking revenue from
newspapers, but it's not the case.

~~~
richardjordan
Right. Back in the pre-web days when I was a mere teen I would spend
breakfast, and often late afternoon going through the English broadsheet
newspapers. Usually back to front to read the sports first.

But the key is that the first read, the morning one, involved skimming
articles for their gist and reading the ones that interested me. The afternoon
session possibly involved reading more, due to boredom.

The real problem the newspapers have is that most of the articles they produce
fail the skim test. I don't want to read more. I get the gist. I'm not
interested. If they're good I click through and read them on the original
site... often then clicking to other things I find there. Win for the Google
link to them. If it's a hot topic I'll often read many articles from many pubs
on the same topic. But in a world with so many news sources the truth is they
don't stand out, I am not going to check a thousand sources very day, or even
ten. So I'm not going to wade through to find the things I'm interested in. If
they don't want their headings and summaries in Google I don't care about
their product.

And I'm a Google user. I pay Google's bills. I don't want them raising my
rates in other areas to pay publishers for links to content that I may skim
over and never want to read in depth. Why should my costs for Google - in
terms of what they can deliver me for all that surplus attention of mine they
harvest over a year - go up to subsidize failing newspapers producing product
for which the market rate doesn't support their costs?

------
cdooh
Do they really thing this will stop the continuing decline of their
newspapers?

------
EGreg
I'm sure some lawmakers have heard of robots.txt, so what is their rationale?

~~~
geon
Greed?

------
zwieback
Technology generally finds a way around poorly written laws but I think there
is a real underlying problem. Google News has become its own thing now. The
headlines, snippets and icons I get from a variety of newspapers is often
enough to skim over the day's news and I only click on maybe one or two
stories for more in-depth reading. I think a way for Google to charge news
sources and for news sources to charge Google both make sense but they have to
be developed by willing participants, not by legislators.

------
ommunist
Nothing scary, they just are aiming carefully to shoot their own buttocks with
some good German schrapnel. If there will be no readership for them, they will
not be able to sell ads and die in 3-5 years, depending on long term
contracts. And this is a good thing. Since you can use free Russian and Urdu
headlines for free! Oh, I forgot to mention Chinese.

------
conanite
It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the
relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?

~~~
belorn
No one likes to burn bridges, even if they get sued. They could do a "this is
how google would look if you go through with this" day, but for now they look
to be taking the more safe route with lawyers.

~~~
boboblong
So, in other words, the posters defending Google are being totally
disingenuous when they claim that Google couldn't care less about these
petulant little publishers and that the publishers need Google far more than
vice versa. Apparently, Google really doesn't want to take these publishers
off Google News.

------
travisjtodd
This is rather interesting that it would be coming from Axel Springer. As
someone involved in the Berlin tech scene I've seen them really investing a
lot of money in innovative events and companies. My guess is there is some
typical corporate disconnect there. I doubt this makes it through the
legislation.

------
opminion
_which is why the law proposal, called “Leistungsschutzrecht” (hashtag #lsr),
is currently being discussed in the German Parliament_

Next time a German native speaker tells me his loves his mother tongue because
of the possibility of concatenating words together, I will point them to that
hashtag.

~~~
ripperdoc
That statement doesn't make sense. If they didn't contatenate, the string
would be even longer and less useful as hashtag, or it would be concatenated
again, as most hashtags in English are concatenated words...

~~~
opminion
Note that the hashtag they are using is #lsr, not #Leistungsschutzrecht .

The irony is that they are not taking advantage of concatenation, in a
language register where it is widely used (twitter), and in a tongue where it
is idiomatic (German).

------
bijant
what is really scary is not the proposed law but the public relation campaign
google is mounting against it. It is a (very likely) unprecedented internet
lobbying effort involving not only googles advertising network, but also a
link on google.de (no longer visible). To a casual observer, watching the
short youtube clip or reading the campaign slogan "Willst Du auch in Zukunft
finden, was Du suchst?"("Do you want to continue to find what you're searching
for ?") it could seem like the government was trying to shut down google
search.

It seems like a scary prospect to think of the ways google, a private company,
could start to use its unparralled reach to lobby for legislation in its favor
around the entire globe.

------
EGreg
I think our decentralized streams protocol should solve this kind of thing.

Basically RSS with push and access controls. You subscribe to a feed and get
pushes / pulls as long as you are paying it. Why isn't there a standard
protocol for this on the web?

------
Shorel
I will put a contrarian point of view (just for the sake of discussion):

The law is good because Google can afford to pay and the hordes of
blogspammers can't.

Therefore Germany will be the first country without blogspam.

~~~
derleth
> blogspam

You have a weird definition of 'blogspam' if using a headline to point to an
article you're commenting on qualifies as 'blogspam'. There's nothing in the
law (from what I've seen) that says "If you have more than a paragraph of
text, this doesn't apply to you" or anything similar to that.

------
daniel-cussen
The reason newspapers are sacrificing their credibility for money is quite
simply because they're running out of money faster than they are running out
of credibility.

------
Zash
This is scary? I expected Nazi zombies!

------
boboblong
Here are a few points to consider:

1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every
news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is
"fair use" is totally absurd.

2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never
gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out"
mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i.e., Google must ask
to use their content.

3)If we believe that intellectual property has become an obsolete concept
altogether, we should be prepared to accept all of the consequences of this,
e.g., a site might pop up using a new TLD that accepts a search query from a
client, passes it on to Google using a spoofed IPv6 address, and passes the
result back to the client. We also shouldn't care about plagiarism, trademark
infringement, etc., because the Internet has clearly made these concepts
obsolete and laws related to them unenforceable.

~~~
phlo
And here's why those points don't matter:

1) The debate is centered on Google News. As far as I know, News is one of the
few services where Google haven't, don't and won't show ads. "Systematic
clipping of one or two sentences [...] for the purpose of providing an ad-free
overview and linking to the respective stories" sounds like "fair use" to me.

2) They are publishing their material on the web, for the world to see. If
you'd want an opt-in for every crawler out there, no search engine would ever
be able to take off and index a significant portion of the web. By the way, an
opting out from all (obedient) crawlers is as simple as "Disallow: /"

3) Passing a query on to google through a spoofed IPv6 address doesn't make
any sense. Apart from that, there's several services offering just that
functionality. Try DuckDuckGo, for example. (I'm not quite sure which search
engine they use nowadays, but afaik, the project started out using Google.)

~~~
patrickg
2) There is no such thing as "fair use" in Germany's copyright law.

