Something really scary is going on in Germany

Isn't this a case for the internet bat signal? I must admit I still haven't included it on my sites, mostly because last time I looked they only provided JavaScript hooks making my site vulnerable to their site being hacked. Perhaps they have an API by now?

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.

"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists."

Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past -- research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals overseas.

What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of abstracts) may also be unfair.

I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good articles would have likely declined.

Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.

This is scary? I expected Nazi zombies!

I think the problem here is that this goes against the basic premise of the web itself and hypermedia. What about my blog where I post the (in my opinion) most important news of the day and link to the sources. Okay, those links are manually curated. What if I write a script that automatically posts (tweets?) all the articles I visit. Ok I am not a search engine but where do you draw the line? My point is that this is very hard to define and write down as a law.

Is a discussion necessary? Absolutely. Do we need a strong press? You bet your ass we do. Do we perhaps need to restructure the current model and fund the fourth power? Yeah, I dont know. Is this the way? Certainly not.

But I think this is only another symptom of a trend currently manifestating where people with ties and no insight into the matter try to control and profit from a medium they are just beginning to understand. The ITU conference, this guy in the UK who wanted to sue everyoneone retweeting an article,....