Something really scary is going on in Germany • Hacker News Board

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#81

Post by walshemj » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 11:44 PM UTC

slurgfest wrote: post #56

alex_c wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Since Germany is a populous and wealthy country, Google has a strong commercial interest in not removing German content. It's hard to imagine what nefarious thing Google would force Germany to do this way.

why there are other Publishers that will step in to fill the gap New Scientist has just launched a German language site for example.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#82

Post by derleth » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 12:58 AM UTC

czr80 wrote: post #79

jamesbritt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[C]ontent of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there. If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent. People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee…

If it had zero value why would Google be interested in it?

> If it had zero value why would Google be interested in it?

Again, value is subjective. Even if you think it has zero value, even if every engineer at Google thinks it has zero value, it might have value to someone out there. If nothing else, it could be a part of a corpus linguistics study.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#83

Post by ripperdoc » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 1:02 AM UTC

opminion wrote: post #80

which is why the law proposal, called “Leistungsschutzrecht” (hashtag #lsr), is currently being discussed in the German Parliament Next time a German native speaker tells me his loves his mother tongue because of the possibility of concatenating words together, I will point them to that hashtag.

That statement doesn't make sense. If they didn't contatenate, the string would be even longer and less useful as hashtag, or it would be concatenated again, as most hashtags in English are concatenated words...

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#84

Post by ripperdoc » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 1:07 AM UTC

Why is this topic so complicated? A Google news snippet very rarely would suffice for a user, if they are interested they would click through, if they are not, they would not visiting the newspaper anyway. Google are not showing ads in Google News, although they might show them in search results. But still, no profit that newspaper could address is being taken by Google. In fact, Google is providing traffic.

So taking all the philosophical statements out of the way, what is the econimical case that the newspapers are making? If Google actually showed a bigger part or the whole articles, they'd obviously be taking revenue from newspapers, but it's not the case.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#85

Post by snogglethorpe » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 1:20 AM UTC

alex_c wrote: post #33

sliverstorm wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

But everybody knows this ... Google knows it, we know it, and Google knows we know it.

Google knows that although they could get away with a lot in the short-run, abusing this power would hurt them badly in the long run. They gain huge benefits from being seen as more or less neutral (to the extent possible—some people will never view them that way).

As a result they seem to have been very, very, careful in how they use this power, only wielding it when explicitly ordered to by an authority with power enough to force the issue.

I'm sure the humans at Google are often tempted (who wouldn't be?), but they appear to also be smart enough to resist that temptation...

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#86

Post by zmmmmm » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 2:25 AM UTC

morsch wrote: post #62

Step 1: Make Google pay for including you in search results. Step 2: Force Google to include you by demanding something like search engine neutrality.

Step 3: Google requires payment from German publishers to be included in the search index, exactly offsetting fees incurred in Step 1. It would be quite reasonable, I think.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#87

Post by zmmmmm » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 2:29 AM UTC

jamesjporter wrote: post #47

Tichy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And then when your blog quotes or links to some other site (let's face it, a huge amount of blogging is discussion of news stories ...)? - they can't put that under CC and they might even be asked to pay for the privilege of linking to the story - they basically get hit both ways.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#88

Post by daemin » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 2:53 AM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #20

api wrote: post #6

If 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…

Blogs and smaller such institutions could license their headline and snipper 'content' for a nice fee of $0.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#89

Post by a_bonobo » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 4:27 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #65

schabernakk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

You get it right, from the parts of the debate I followed this is their main argument - "they display extracts of our texts, and people then don't visit our page but stay on Google News", which is of course unprovable.

(you could get the amount of people clicking through by stopping to list these snippets - the visitors you loose are the visitors that used to click through)

Another thing to add is: Google runs no ads on Google News, so _directly_ they don't make any money using other people's news (indirectly by binding customers etc.)

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#90

Post by dasil003 » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 4:59 AM UTC

czr80 wrote: post #79

jamesbritt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[C]ontent of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there. If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent. People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee…

If it had zero value why would Google be interested in it?

Google's value is in its comprehensiveness. Both the marginal value and cost to maintain a single piece of content in their index is extremely close to zero.