Do they really thing this will stop the continuing decline of their newspapers?
Something really scary is going on in Germany
61–70 of 156 posts
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#62Step 1: Make Google pay for including you in search results.
Step 2: Force Google to include you by demanding something like search engine neutrality.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#63I will put a contrarian point of view (just for the sake of discussion): The law is good because Google can afford to pay and the hordes of blogspammers can't. Therefore Germany will be the first country without blogspam.
> blogspam
You have a weird definition of 'blogspam' if using a headline to point to an article you're commenting on qualifies as 'blogspam'. There's nothing in the law (from what I've seen) that says "If you have more than a paragraph of text, this doesn't apply to you" or anything similar to that.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#64To 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. 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 ti…
> 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…
Isn't the problem here that the benefit is not directly visible? Same reason there is still no global agreement on a proceeding against global warming. There is no doubt that you need a functioning, diverse and independent press for a functioning democracy. So indirectly everyone (corporations as well) benefits from this institution.
In germany we have a couple public tv stations which are financed through a fee everyone owning a tv must pay, regardless if they watch those channels or not. They arent bound to a viewing quota, are independet from the government and have an educational mandate.
Well, at least in theory: In practice huge amounts of money are just wasted by a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus, politicians and the church have a saying in the content and the stuff shown is becoming more and more like the crap on private tv stations.
I think something like this could be a viable solutions. But implementing it, especially the algorithm which decides who gets how much is very hard if not impossible. To much attack surface for illegitimate interventions.
edit: typed that comment before I had time to view your link. great read. Never really thought about the "save newspapers vs save journalists vs save society" aspect.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well I can only read English transcribed interpretations so perhaps a native German speaker can correct me.
As I understand it this is their argument:
Google crawls site X, a user visits Google News or Google Search, Google displays a page which has extracted content from site X as a link (usually the headline) and a "snippet" of what that title is referring to. Google also has advertisements on the page.
Now, as I understand their argument, The publishers claim Google makes money off someone who clicks on an advertisement on these 'constructed' pages. Google's news page is full of headlines and snippets that came from other publications. Google doesn't pay those publications, but the only "reason" that someone is reading the news page in the first place is because those headlines and snippets are on that page. Therefore Google should either share any revenue they got from the ad click with the people whose 'content' was on the page, or they should pre-pay for that content in the first place.
Does that seem like it captures it? If you agree that it does, then we can speculate that the publishers lobbying for this 'law' believe that in this economic transaction Google is getting a better deal than they are.
Except that they conveniently ignore the economic benefit they are getting from Google for telling the world that their web site has interesting content (or at least content related to the news interest or search interest of the web searcher).
Presumably these publishers make income either through sales or advertising on their web site. And those sales are proportional to the traffic at their web site. Google could charge to include them in their search/news results (and they in fact do that in search with AdWords) and would it be more or less than the papers would charge to use a snippet?
The easiest way to educate a publisher on the value of having their results appear in Google is to stop having them appear in Google. Ask any web site that was knocked off the first page by the Panda update how that feels. Those guys really "get" the value they receive by being up there. Publishers don't get that yet. (well not all of them). So Google stops indexing them. Their traffic goes back to pre-1995 levels (which means nobody goes there) and their internet costs (hosting, etc) now exceed the revenue from online advertising. Whoops! Education achieved.
Of course I could be totally off base here, there could be some moral argument I'm missing but frankly I think its all about the money here and not all of the 'value' is accounted for.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a great article. So brief, yet so much justice. Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.
>so much justice I suggest the "careful what you wish for" lesson applies both ways. "Justice" implies that Google can and should get away with a lot of things under threat of removing your content from their index.
See my comment below, but to recap the point, Publishers don't necessarily understand the value of being listed by Google. Not listing them is both the fastest, and most difficult to argue with, way to educate them as to that value.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could newspapers actively allow search engines etc. to quote them? I am thinking of heise when I say this, one of the few utterly "good guys" where "we won't sue, you can trust us" would actually work. Or would this law mean the state attorney can simply sue Google et al, regardless of the stance of the supposed victim?
IANAL but I think this doesnt fall under the responsibility of the state attorney since it isnt part of the "strafrecht"/criminal law. I guess the process would be comparable to how copyright violations are currently handled.
Oh, so I would assume without anyone to sue, there'd be no case? If that is correct, I would predict if these publishers get their way, those that make use of the law would paint themselves into a corner. So it's not just about protecting our interwebs, but also about protecting them from their own stupidity ^^
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
@ChuckMcM That sounds right, but to entertain another perspective for a second, maybe the point being made is that the amount of power Google has over publishers is unhealthy. The Publishers seem to think that search engines should be fighting for their business, not the other way around. Its hard to tell what such a drastic change in the system could do, but maybe it doesn't have to be bad.
I for one believe that in order to have the most accurate search results, the rankings should be based on content, not money.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#69The bigger trend to this story is that information changed from something that was scarce to something that is now abundant.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don't know the exact phrasing either. Also not sure if everybody wants to put their content under CC. I think the government could make this messy enough to even foil the CC plan. For example they could set it up like GEMA for music - there would be an entity distributing the money and collecting it on behalf of the content providers. Besides, is there a standard way yet to announce CC content? That would be necess…
AFAIK this is the way to go: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works