German Newspaper 'Snippet' Law Passes: Watered Down, But Still Stupid
from the how-small-is-smallest? dept
For a year now, Techdirt has been following the sorry saga of Germany's attempt to make search engines and others pay for licenses to show even small excerpts from online newspapers. The main motivation seems to be to take money from Google for being successful, and to give it to the German publishers that are struggling.
Even though the idea that newspapers were suffering because of the short excerpts shown as part of search results is absurd, and existing copyright law already forbids unauthorized use of longer extracts, publishers had enough friends in the German parliament to get the "snippets" law pushed through today. However, along the way, a small amendment was made to the text that makes it slightly less damaging. According to the new wording (pdf - German original), quotations will have to be licensed unless they are:
single words or the smallest excerpts
Unhelpfully, no definition for "smallest excerpts" is given, which means there is still considerable uncertainty over just how many words can be quoted without paying a licensing fee. That's bound to have a chilling effect on the use of snippets, as publications err on the side of caution before court cases begin to establish what is and isn't acceptable. Another issue is whether quotations in blogs or on social networks will be exempt: according to the German magazine Der Spiegel they will ("probably", in the case of Facebook). But again, we won't know for sure until cases come to court.
Happily, there is still some doubt over whether the law will ever come into force. According to Der Spiegel again, the SPD (Socialist Party) may be able to overturn the law in Germany's other legislative body, the Bundesrat. Let's hope it succeeds, and saves Germany from the embarrassment of trying to implement such a backward-looking and unworkable law.
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Filed Under: copyright, fair use, germany, newspapers, search engines, snippets
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It would indeed be very interesting to see the results. I expect lawsuits on the level of judge judy.
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I'm wondering if foreign publishers will be able to collect as well or if this article just is missing some of the legal-ese to explain it's just the German papers that the country wants to drive out of business.
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yet another example of something ridiculous happening because the USA allowed, even encouraged, the music and movie industries to go down the road of extorting money out of anywhere and anyone, rather than encouraging those industries to adapt, to progress, to listen to others than to just themselves and produce things for today's market. the stupidity of what was started has spread like a plague, making the successes of a few the means to a permanent income for doing nothing new, to others.
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I take exception with your calling one of Europe's highly progressive laws backward. You must maintain a solid forward looking progressive attitude that fully promotes the underclass at the expense of those damn Republicans.
What can we expect next? For you to call the New York Times conservative.
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Do whatever NY TImes does...subscription based articles. :)
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Easy to work around. Allow me to demonstrate with the title of this article:
GermanNewspaperSnippetLawPassesWateredDownButStillStupid
Single word. No infringement.
Now, off to profit from Mike's hard work.
* evil grin *
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* evil snicker *
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Adrian Lopez
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abmahnung
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"take money from Google for being successful" --
By the by, Google is reported to be sitting on $48 BILLION IN CASH. Most of it is sheltered off-shore from wherever they're dodging taxes, mostly the US.
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Re: "take money from Google for being successful" --
Can't control the knee JERK reaction to bash Google?
It's a stupid law and the German public should be firing off rants at these obviously bought off politicians.
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Then the next thing you know it will be discovered that your local nationwide bank is in a concerted effort with government to track and monitor and plan coordinated contingencies against the people. Oh wait..
Why are there a handful of, theoretically elected, political people facilitating this,, as was mentioned up in post#2, plague? Because it is a rather nasty situation and it's not looking good. Don't you think these folks would be uncomfortable with their head up their butts and for so long? I guess the RIAA/MPAA told certain folks it feels good to have your head up there. Something.
single words or snippets? "Your Mama."
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-THE
-THE
-THE
-VOLCANO
-MURDER
-HOMICIDE
-AN
-MURDER
-THE
-WHEN
-HOW
-MURDER
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Hard to imagine something less clear ... or more likely to result in lots of wasted time in court. Great for law firms though.
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a
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**whew** We all dodged a bullet there.
Otherwise, anybody writing pretty much anything in German on the internet would owe the publishers of German online newspapers money for all the words they are "copying".
I don't know German, but can you imagine all the revenue they would have generated from the equivalents of "the" or "and"?
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A law like this would effectively put a black-out on all things german. What a huge PR mistake could that be? Come visit Germany: just don't quote the news in your e-mail letters (or your family blog spot) to home.
How could any piece of legislation leave the details to the court system? Isn't that just saying lets try to “get away with whatever we can”? How bad can the German legislators be to skip out on the details of a law. Its like leaving the answer blank on a test and expecting to get credit for it anyway. I think they need a homeroom teacher to oversee and make them show their work (so to speak). Sloppy legislation at best.
I must be appalled (there are so many question marks after my sentences).
This is just another attempt at dying business models, in this case newspaper industry, struggling to force into law monopolistic methods regardless of the collateral damage.
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Oops
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How would this be any different since they are demanding payment for even small snippets, meaning that the whole site should be blocked on the odd chance something could be searched, such as a snippet?
This same cure will work with German newspapers, that the Belgium newspapers got for their demands.
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The Federal Association of German newspaper publishers (BDZV) already stated that even the watered down version does NOT exclude Google snippets. That means, Google has to pay for any search result that refers to content provided by newspapers.
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BTW, the Bundesrat cannot overturn the law. Since it's an "Einspruchsgesetz" the SPD can only force the law to be reconsidered in the mediation committee which may make some amendments or withold approval in which case it gets send back to the Bundestag where again the coalition will pass the law.
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Should this law go active, without challenge, I look forward to the screams as the newspapers suddenly find themselves effectively cut off from the internet in germany.
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