Google 'not amused' with Germany and France's plan to extend copyright protection to republished news snippets
A German copyright bill could force Google to compensate news publishers for republishing their news snippets. France threatens to follow and Italy is still contemplating action.
Online news readers using Google’s News service (Google News) often read only the headline and summary of a news article, as provided by Google News, without continuing to the original article on the publisher’s own website. Currently, the way Google uses news snippets is allowed under quotation rights or 'fair use'. News publishers, however, claim to suffer from decreased revenue from advertising as a result of fewer visitors to their websites.
The ancillary copyright contained in the German proposal would extend copyright protection to news article snippets republished by search engines. This would force entities like Google to pay royalties to display news publishers’ material, even short excerpts. The Bill is scheduled for review by the lower house of the German Parliament in November.
President Francois Hollande of France intends to follow the German example if Google proves unable to reach a voluntary compensation agreement with publishers by the end of the year. Google, in turn, has expressed its discontent in a letter to the French Ministers, detailing the detrimental effects to users, content providers and the promotion of content in the French language if it would no longer be allowed to re-use the French newspaper snippets for free.
The question is whether such legislation is truly conducive to creativity, innovation and ultimately, economic growth in the information societies of the 21st century and not simply a disguised form of protectionism of domestic entities that find themselves struggling to adapt to new, digital, realities.
Read more on the German copyright bill on Future of Copyright:
Comments(2)
Lance
What's next? Bittorrent network operators having to pay for copying and redistributing (parts of) books, music, videos, software,games, journals and articles??
Future of Copyright
@Lance, yes it will be interesting to follow closely how this debate develops. Many European governments are now exploring new ways to adapt copyright law to the online world and to regulate the digital space. the outcome of this process is not yet clear. we will keep you updated!
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