Top German Publisher Says: 'You Wouldn't Steal A Pound Of Butter... So We Need A Snippet Tax'

from the articles-11-and-13-must-go dept

Last week, Mike provided a virtuoso excoriation of the European publishers' shameless demand to be given even more copyright control over tiny snippets of news stories as part of the awful EU copyright directive. As that post pointed out, the publishers' "mythbuster" did nothing of the sort, but it did indicate a growing panic among the industry as more critical attention is brought to bear on the ridiculous "snippet tax" -- Article 11 of the proposed new EU copyright law -- which has already failed twice elsewhere. The German site Über Medien -- "About Media" -- offers another glimpse of publishers trying desperately to justify the unjustifiable (original in German). Actually, it's one publisher in particular: Mathias Döpfner. He's the CEO of the German company Axel Springer, one of the world's largest publishers, although even his company is unlikely to benefit much from the snippet tax. Speaking on Austrian television, Döpfner made a rather remarkable claim:

It's about the question of whether the intellectual good that is produced is a protected good or not. At the moment it is a good that is not protected in the digital world. Anyone can take an article, a video, a journalistic element that a publisher has prepared, copy it, put it in another context and even market it successfully.

Yes, the boss of one of the biggest and most successful publishers in the world is claiming that digital material is not protected by copyright, and that anyone can take and use it, which is why new laws are needed. Since he was talking about the EU's Article 11, he also seems to be conflating using snippets with taking an entire article. To underline his point, Döpfner offered a homely comparison:

If I can go to the grocery store and just grab a pound of butter or a carton of milk without paying for it, why should anyone come and pay for it, and why would anyone else offer butter or milk?

But that's not what Google is doing when it uses snippets. It's more like it is taking a picture of the pound of butter, and then showing people the photo along with the address of the grocery store when they search for "butter" using Google's search engine. Google is not stealing anything, just sending business to the store. It's the same with displaying snippets that link to the original article. The Über Medien post rightly goes on to note that publishers don't really have a problem with Google showing snippets and sending them traffic. But their sense of entitlement is so great they want to force the US company to pay for the privilege of sending them traffic. Or, to put it in terms of Döpfner's forced analogy:

Publishers do not want Google to stop stealing butter and milk in their supermarkets. The publishers want to oblige Google to steal bread and milk from them and pay for it.

The fact that the head of German's biggest publisher resorts to the old "you wouldn't steal a car/pound of butter/carton of milk" rhetoric shows just how vanishingly thin the argument in favor of a snippet tax really is. It's time for the EU politicians to recognize this, and remove it from the proposed copyright directive, along with Article 13's even-more pernicious upload filter. EU citizens can use the new SaveYourInternet site to contact their representatives. Ahead of the important EU vote on the proposed law early next week, now would be a really good time to do that.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: article 11, copyright, copyright directive, eu, link tax, mathias dopfner, snippet tax
Companies: axel springer, google

Turkish President Erdogan Now Demands Injunction Against German Media Boss For Saying He Laughed At Anti-Erdogan Poem

from the give-it-a-rest,-erdogan dept

Every time you think that the thin-skinned, insecure freakouts of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can't get any more crazy, they do. If you don't recall, Erdogan has a notrious thin skin, and a long history of censorship of views he doesn't like. But since becoming President, this has gone into overdrive, with him filing over 1800 cases against people in Turkey for insulting him -- including the famous case in which someone passed around an internet meme comparing Erdogan to Gollum.

That kind of nuttiness jumped international boundaries recently, when Erdogan's lawyers discovered a long-forgotten German law that made it illegal to insult the head of a foreign country, and demanded that the law be used against a satirical German comedian, Jan Bohmermann, who purposefully read an insulting poem about Erdogan, in order to mock his thin skin. Some might find suing over that poem to be... well... a bit on the nose in making the point the poem was intended to make. But, to Erdogan, it appears that suing over insults is just something he can't stop doing. More recently, Erdogan discovered that Switzerland has a similar law and went after people there too (while also getting a Dutch reporter arrested).

Apparently, the fact that the most commonly mocked aspect of Erdogan these days is his inability to handle people mocking him hasn't made Erdogan realize that the more he freaks out, the more people are going to mock him. His latest move is especially crazy. It appears that the CEO of German mega-publishers Axel Springer, Mathias Dopfner, wrote an "open letter" in support of Bohmermann, which stated that he "laughed out loud" at Bohmermann's poem, and suggested that the case against Bohmermann is a problem for free speech. This is obviously a reasonable opinion held by many.

Erdogan's response? Apparently, it's to use the same law that was used against Bohmermann, to demand an injunction against Dopfner for publishing the letter, in order to get it taken down. Thankfully, this request was quickly rejected by a German court, saying that the open letter was "a contribution to building public opinion in a controversial debate."

Erdogan and his lawyer, Ralf Hocker, seem to only want to double down on this. In one article he says (prior to the injunction being denied) that if it were denied, he would appeal the decision to a higher court. And Hocker has some weird ideas about free speech and human dignity:

“Mr Erdogan is a human being and human dignity is inviolable,” Hocker said, adding that this was placed above the freedom of press, art and opinion in the German constitution.

Uh, no. Dignity is very much violable. If you do something that trashes your own dignity. Like suing comedians for making a joke about you. Or suing nearly 2,000 other people for making jokes about you. The loss of dignity is not from the poem or the insults. It's from Erdogan's own actions.

In the NY Times link above, Hocker, makes some even more ridiculous statements:

Ralf Hocker, a lawyer representing Mr. Erdogan in Germany, said he had a mandate to seek an injunction against anyone who publicly insults the Turkish president, to try to stop what he described as an “avalanche” of scornful abuse.

“Everyone thinks they are allowed to insult Mr. Erdogan in any way that they want because they do not find him very sympathetic,” Mr. Höcker said. “But this is not about sympathy, it is about human dignity, namely to protect it.”

Of course, seeking an injunction against people mocking Erdogan for trying to silence all this criticism isn't going to stop the avalanche. It's just going to make it bigger. And, no, the reason people think they are allowed to insult Mr. Erdogan is because they believe in freedom of expression and that Erdogan has done things worthy of scorn. Stop doing those things -- like suing people over meaningless jokes -- and the scorn goes away. And, again, suing over "protecting human dignity" seems like an odd way to improve your dignity.

Filed Under: censorship, germany, injunction, insults, jan bohmermann, mathias dopfner, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey
Companies: axel springer