

Is the pending German Copyright Bill good or bad for the Web? - timmclean
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/11/28/is-the-pending-german-copyright-bill-good-or-bad-for-the-web/

======
charonn0
Grab gun, aim at foot; getting purged from Google ( _et al_ ) will not help a
news site's bottom line.

~~~
wmf
I expect the next step is to make de-indexing illegal.

~~~
mbreese
They couldn't force a Google to index German news sites. Or rather, they
could, but Google could just leave Germany and the risk of Google pulling out
completely from Germany would be pretty high.

Plus, it's not clear how this would work from an EU point of view... could
Germany dictate what an Irish company _had_ to do, and then charge a tax on
that operation?

Or course, Google could also index the German news sites, but then penalize
them so heavily in scoring query results that they'd never appear. Problem
solved! In the index? Yep! Appearing in a search result? Nope!

The idea of forcing a search engine to index particular sites just starts to
get into the realm of silly. Then again, your should never put it past a
government to do something silly.

~~~
wmf
I think these German sites believe that they're entitled to be paid by Google,
and they'll view _any_ action that Google takes to avoid paying as an
illegitimate loophole which they will try to close. If framed as an antitrust
issue (Google's using a search monopoly to put newspapers out of business),
forced indexing might not seem like an unreasonable remedy. Remember that this
is the same country that believes book prices should be fixed by law.

~~~
charonn0
If search engines could neither index these sites for free nor leave them out
of the index, the German law would be amount to little more than extortion.

