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.
Something really scary is going on in Germany
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Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#42FWIW, 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.
The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.
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 ...").
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#43This is why Germans must vote for Pirate Party at the next elections.
Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#44Interesting 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. Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled. My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly d…
robots.txt ?
yes. They dont want to block google or other crawlers. They still want their traffic, but they also want to get paid for getting crawled and listed.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#45Why 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?
I feel that its because google is of a size where the idea of getting a letter from its lawyers is a scary prospect.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#46This is why Germans must vote for Pirate Party at the next elections. Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.
I would really like to like the pirate party but in their current state they are absolutely unvotable for me. This is one of their core topics but I havent heard anything from them yet. What I have heard is that the youth organizations of almost every party (yeah I know, including the young pirates) have voiced their concerns regardings the lsr.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#47If they succeed they will simply remove themselves from the discourse and accelerate their obsolescence.
Sure, and I would welcome that. But I think smaller publishers (including bloggers) might have problems, too. The law would apply to their blogs as well, they would have to figure out how to allow Google and others to still quote them. It might be so complicated that it would cause a lot of blogs to shut down. Other news processors were already mentioned in the article. I just fear that it would make it too costly to…
Would it work to just put your blog under a permissive distribution license (Creative Commons or the like)? I know nothing about the German legal system or the exact phrasing of this law; could someone with more domain knowledge comment on how this would interact with licensing terms?
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#48From the first comment on that: "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." 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…
There is the "Zitatrecht" (quotation right), which allows you to quote short excerpts, provided they accurately represent the original text and you acknowledge the source.
But unlike in the US this is only valid for texts, not for other copyrighted material like movies. ( This means that youtube remixes are most likely illegal in germany.)
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#49This is why Germans must vote for Pirate Party at the next elections. Oh, and I've noticed Twitter shows snippets from websites, too, now, so this will affect them as well.
Unless you're a fan of individual liberty and don't like state controlled redistribution of wealth.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#50I'm sure some lawmakers have heard of robots.txt, so what is their rationale?