It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?
Something really scary is going on in Germany
101–110 of 156 posts
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#102I'm very disappointed with Europe. There is a trend of idiotic legislation drafted, & voted on by people who don't really understand the implications. They just don't understand the internet & technology enough and/or aren't smart enough. It' embarrassing.
The other recent example was/is the brain-dead UK/EU cookie law. Is our privacy any more protected? No. All we got was some dumb generic "cookie policy" popups that we have to "agree" to and further balkanization of the web. Additional costs to having a website (are there any scaremongering companies offering auditing to make sure your website does not expose you to legal risk?). Disempowering people by raising the barrier to running a site.
All downside. No upside from any perspective. We can't even blame lobbies or interested parties because literally nobody got anything positive from this. Just pure stupidity.
They should have know better than this.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#103Here 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 se…
2) There is no such thing as "fair use" in Germany's copyright law.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#104It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?
No one likes to burn bridges, even if they get sued. They could do a "this is how google would look if you go through with this" day, but for now they look to be taking the more safe route with lawyers.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#105It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?
Why would that kill the law?
All it would do is make Google news useless for German news.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
That's a strawman; the bots never indicated intention to read. They indicated (via `User-Agent' header) intention to index content and got HTTP 200 OK response to that.
Nothing in the HTTP protocol specs (RFC 2616) even suggests it is only meant for direct human consumption. To the contrary, it states,
user agent
The client which initiates a request. These are often browsers,
editors, spiders (web-traversing robots), or other end user tools.
Please don't be obtuse. The whole matter is not about Google doing something strange or different than any other search engine. It's just about collective bargaining of one business group against another business. Some german press companies stood up as a (self-appointed and thus somewhat suspect) representation of whole german press industry and are trying to get a bigger slice of the cake.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#107Here 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…
1) Normal search at google takes one sentence, title of the webpage and links them together. To support that service, they have ads. If news take two sentences, how is that totally absurd compared to one, and why is search totally acceptable but news search not?
2) as other has said, public sites are indexed in an opt-out system. Opt-in would not work, and would destroy any form of search system, indexing, yellow pages, and so on.
3) This is not an intellectual property issue. Its a term of use issue if one want to be included in google search. One can not say yes to be included in search, but not if there are ads around. Either you want google to give you service, or you don't. I wish I could get a gemail free from spying, a google search thats anonymous, and free telephone calls without any recording/advertizements, but no. I can't get that from google, because their services to have a price tag.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#108This is rather interesting that it would be coming from Axel Springer. As someone involved in the Berlin tech scene I've seen them really investing a lot of money in innovative events and companies. My guess is there is some typical corporate disconnect there. I doubt this makes it through the legislation.
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
How are profits generated on news.google.com?
Re: Something really scary is going on in Germany
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In addition: Google has no ads on the google news pages.