Something really scary is going on in Germany

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. <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-anger-at-google-move/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-a...</a>

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergleicht-google-mit-den-taliban-1212-96172.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergl...</a>

I'm very disappointed with Europe. There is a trend of idiotic legislation drafted, &#38; voted on by people who don't really understand the implications. They just don't understand the internet &#38; technology enough and/or aren't smart enough. It' embarrassing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>They should have know better than this.

Step 1: Make Google pay for including you in search results.<p>Step 2: Force Google to include you by demanding something like search engine neutrality.

As this site is nearly down, I add my thoughts as a comment here as well:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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...<p>... 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.<p>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.

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.<p>The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.<p>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 ...").<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele</a>

This is why Germans must vote for Pirate Party at the next elections.<p>Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.

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.<p>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).

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

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

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?

The bigger trend to this story is that information changed from something that was scarce to something that is now abundant.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

From the first comment on that:<p><i>"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."</i><p>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.<p>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 <i>is</i> such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?

The Economist talked about this a week ago in an article :<p>"Taxing times As newspapers’ woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make Google pay for the news it publishes"<p>Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the intended consequences :<p><a href="http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspapers-woes-grow-some-are-lobbying-politicians-make-google-pay-news-it" rel="nofollow">http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...</a>

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.<p>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.

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.<p>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.

503. Here's the Google cache: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://martinweigert.com/something-really-scary-is-going-on-in-germany/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a>

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.)<p>[1]<a href="http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf</a> (German)<p>[EDIT: spelling]

The proper term for pushing this law is "rent-seeking". You must include our content, and you must pay us for it.<p>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.<p>German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.

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.<p>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.<p>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".<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.

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

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?

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

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.<p>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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

<i>which is why the law proposal, called “Leistungsschutzrecht” (hashtag #lsr), is currently being discussed in the German Parliament</i><p>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.

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.<p>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.

I think our decentralized streams protocol should solve this kind of thing.<p>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?

I will put a contrarian point of view (just for the sake of discussion):<p>The law is good because Google can afford to pay and the hordes of blogspammers can't.<p>Therefore Germany will be the first country without blogspam.

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.

This is scary? I expected Nazi zombies!

Here are a few points to consider:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.