Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Something really scary is going on in Germany

martinweigert.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 156 posts

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#91

Post by opminion »

ripperdoc wrote: post #83
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...

Note that the hashtag they are using is #lsr, not #Leistungsschutzrecht .

The irony is that they are not taking advantage of concatenation, in a language register where it is widely used (twitter), and in a tongue where it is idiomatic (German).

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#92

Post by danmaz74 »

schabernakk wrote: post #21
danmaz74 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the quality and quantity of German news on Google would worsen, but the point would be to see if it is Google benefiting more from the newspapers, or the other way around.

It would be interesting to see an official statistic from the big papers where they get their traffic from. I get my news by surfing directly to their homepages. I think I read somewhere that they get most of their hits through the google search although I cant really belive that.

I do the same.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#93

Post by sdoering »

LinXitoW wrote: post #35
sdoering wrote: post #10

As this site is nearly down, I add my thoughts as a comment here as well: Well, some media (FAZ) did a pretty good job, letting Frank Rieger explain the "Leistungsschutzrecht". OK, even there, it was one article of many. And only one. And what is new, when it comes to the press not publishing anything, that goes against their own agenda. Even across a lot of publishing-houses. Well nothing new under the sun. What is…

Some have argued that even just linking to an article might get you sued. After all, most URLs include the title of the article. Obviously, courts will have to decide, but the possibility alone is frightening.

Some years ago here in Germany there has been an court sentence, that a link is no infringement. >The publishers wanted to kill Google News in this way.

Some years before that a friend of mine had written a news search engine, that did exactly the same as Google News, but he did not have the money to fight before court. So he had to remove a lot of publishers from his index.

So I do not think, that linking will become a problem here - but who knows. But the real problem is, that this law might silence independent bloggers. And it was them, who brought important topics into the public discussions, that were ignored by the big publishers, like a planned web-censorship law, that was discussed some years back...

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#94

Post by nifoc »

DasIch wrote: post #54
VMG wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're a fan of individual liberty and don't like state controlled redistribution of wealth.

Redistribution of wealth is necessary to a certain extent, to prevent social inequality from growing. This is a fundamental goal of the German social state as defined by the constitution. If you don't like state controlled redistribution of wealth you should start a revolution or emigrate.

The "extend" to which the German PP wants to redistribute wealth includes a basic income guarantee (without any requirements). Everyone would get X € per month. Fun fact: They decided that they - as a party - want this, but have no idea how to finance it.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#95

Post by boboblong »

Here are a few points to consider:

1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd.

2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i.e., Google must ask to use their content.

3)If we believe that intellectual property has become an obsolete concept altogether, we should be prepared to accept all of the consequences of this, e.g., a site might pop up using a new TLD that accepts a search query from a client, passes it on to Google using a spoofed IPv6 address, and passes the result back to the client. We also shouldn't care about plagiarism, trademark infringement, etc., because the Internet has clearly made these concepts obsolete and laws related to them unenforceable.

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#96

Post by dexen »

boboblong wrote: post #95

Here are a few points to consider: 1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd. 2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i…

> the publishers never gave permission to use their content

Yes they did, yes they did. The publisher explicitly granted access by putting up the news content in an public subdirectory of a public webserver. News items don't just magically `pop up' in the public subdirectory of a webserver. Usually at least two employees (writer, reviewer) have to log into, and explicitly perform several steps in an CMS to publish a news item.

The decision of publisher is encoded as HTTP server configuration (including CMS, if any). The server obviously provides access only to some resources, as the operator wishes -- the ones meant for public consumption, while other resources are password-protected, only accessible from certain network addresses, or not accessible over HTTP at all.

Just as much as an image resource can be, and often is, protected from deep-linking based on HTTP `Referer' header, a news item can be protected from being indexed by Google News bot and displayed as a snipped in Google News based on `User-Agent' header.

In more details:

A typical User Agent that HTTP GETs some resources from the server describes itself with a `User-Agent' header. Google is honest here, and openly indicates its user agent as a spider bot, with explicit purpose of indexing content for web search.

Even better, Google uses a /separate/ spider bot for Google News service, and it is entirely reasonable to serve the general websearch bot with content -- so the website itself remains indexed -- and deny the news bot access, to prevent Google News from displaying news snippets.

Upon HTTP request, the server reads through request, including resource URL, headers (including User-Agent and Cookies, if any), compares that info to configuration. If, and only if, it matches configuration for unrestricted access, the resource is served. Otherwise, access denied condition is indicated and optionally authentication requested.

Let's assume for a moment the law goes through as requested by the press. The most probable implementation would be, Google includes a particular header in HTTP requests -- indicating itself as a `news-bot-that-has-subscription', and the server would, in turn, compare the header with configuration and either reply with news contents, or perhaps indicate access denied, should subscription expire, or for some other reason. The mechanics is pretty much same as it would be today to restrict Google News bot from gathering, and Google News from displaying (some or all) news snippets.

In short, the publishers have already configured some resources as protected from /some/ User Agents (based on request URL, headers, cookies, network address or anything else), and it is entirely their own choice they serve the news to both Google bots (websearch and news).

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#97

Post by phlo »

boboblong wrote: post #95

Here are a few points to consider: 1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd. 2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i…

And here's why those points don't matter:

1) The debate is centered on Google News. As far as I know, News is one of the few services where Google haven't, don't and won't show ads. "Systematic clipping of one or two sentences [...] for the purpose of providing an ad-free overview and linking to the respective stories" sounds like "fair use" to me.

2) They are publishing their material on the web, for the world to see. If you'd want an opt-in for every crawler out there, no search engine would ever be able to take off and index a significant portion of the web. By the way, an opting out from all (obedient) crawlers is as simple as "Disallow: /"

3) Passing a query on to google through a spoofed IPv6 address doesn't make any sense. Apart from that, there's several services offering just that functionality. Try DuckDuckGo, for example. (I'm not quite sure which search engine they use nowadays, but afaik, the project started out using Google.)

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#98

Post by mtgx »

schabernakk wrote: post #46
mtgx wrote: post #43

This 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.

That does seem strange. Any idea what is happening to them? Are they going through leadership change inside the party or policy change, since that last scandal with one of their female leaders?

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#99

Post by chris_wot »

boboblong wrote: post #95

Here are a few points to consider: 1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd. 2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i…

The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content

What, they put it on a public directory with semi permanent URLs for no particular reason? That's a pretty flawed argument!

Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany

#100

Post by Shish2k »

dexen wrote: post #96
boboblong wrote: post #95

Here are a few points to consider: 1) The notion that the systematic clipping of one or two sentences from every news story you can find on the Internet for the purpose of selling ads is "fair use" is totally absurd. 2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i…

> the publishers never gave permission to use their content Yes they did, yes they did. The publisher explicitly granted access by putting up the news content in an public subdirectory of a public webserver. News items don't just magically `pop up' in the public subdirectory of a webserver. Usually at least two employees (writer, reviewer) have to log into, and explicitly perform several steps in an CMS to publish a…

>> the publishers never gave permission to use their content > Yes they did, yes they did. The publisher explicitly granted access

I'm failing to see how "read access" and "license to redistribute for profit" are the same thing

Post reply on HN