11 ms·

Something really scary is going on in Germany

338 points by gorm 14y ago

mmariani 14y ago
503. Here's the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://martinweigert.com/something-really-scary-is-going-on-in-germany/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  I didn't listen much in high school English; is linking to a Google cache of this blog post ironic?
  - sukuriant 14y ago
    No. When a site is down, it is customary on Hacker News for someone to go to Google and get the last cached (saved) version of the web-page from them to post it those that can't access it to read, as a sort of convenience. It's also common for the plaintext of the article to be posted here.
    - pavel_lishin 14y ago
      I meant that it seems like precisely the sort of thing that would be outlawed by the proposed legislation.
  - kibwen 14y ago
    Only if it was a blog post lobbying in favor of the law.
deleted 14y ago
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schabernakk 14y ago
To 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 time back regarding internet filters. 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. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they link to news articles is almost never mentioned. One last thing: 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 wont cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know, but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go. [1]http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergleicht-google-mit-den-taliban-1212-96172.html http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergl...
- leoh 14y ago
  "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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
danmaz74 14y ago
I'm very curious to know how they would determine how much Google should pay, and how to distribute that money to the different publishers. Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).
- schabernakk 14y ago
  Just because they share the same language doesnt mean the journalistic quality regarding local/national news is equal. A german newspaper will always be more detailed and in-depth when it comes to national matters.
  - danmaz74 14y ago
    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.
    - schabernakk 14y ago
      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.
      - jfoutz 14y ago
        I would imagine the bulk of traffic comes from headline news. Some people check the paper every day, some people catch a bit of news on the bus or TV or whatever, then google it. I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that traffic comes from google.
      - 14y ago
api 14y ago
If they succeed they will simply remove themselves from the discourse and accelerate their obsolescence.
- Tichy 14y ago
  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 experiment and would kill small publishers.
  - jamesjporter 14y ago
    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?
    - Tichy 14y ago
      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 necessary to make it work for search engines.
      - atuttle 14y ago
        AFAIK this is the way to go: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works
    - zmmmmm 14y ago
sdoering 14y ago
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 really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there might be a reason for this. Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if these voices are silenced through fear... ... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth, but I just wanted to share the thought. Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.
- LinXitoW 14y ago
  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.
  - sdoering 14y ago
    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...
R_Edward 14y ago
Is there no such thing as Fair Use in German copyright law?
- kibwen 14y ago
  "While many other countries recognize similar exceptions to copyright, only the United States and Israel fully recognize the concept of fair use." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationa...
  - dmayle 14y ago
    This is entirely misleading, because it makes it seem like the policies in other countries is questionable with regards to fair use, or perhaps with lesser rights. In France, for example, there is no such thing as fair use, but that's only because 'fair use' in the US is not defined as what you're allowed to do, however, but as a sort of vague statement about perhaps being able to use things. In France, it is strictly codified: You are able to make private showings of copyrighted material You are allowed to make private copies (with a few exceptions, e.g. software backups allowed, but copying your poster so you can hang it in two different rooms is illegal, as is copying your software to two different computers so two different people can use it) You can make copies of non-educational works for educational uses (ie. no photocopying textbooks, but you can copy yesterday's newspaper article all you want) Parody Citations Etc.
neumann_alfred 14y ago
From the first comment on that: "What’s wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce? No one has to use their headlines if they don’t want to pay for it." What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example. I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I love quotes. Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there is such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?
- kibwen 14y ago
  In the spirit of DRY, here's a link to the a comment of mine, 200 pixels away on this very page, answering that exact question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289 But I suppose I really should have refactored the comment out into a top-level comment and linked to it from both. :)
  - neumann_alfred 14y ago
    Okay, that kinda leaves Israel since I'd never move to the US :P Thanks!
- yk 14y ago
  There is the "Zitatrecht" (quotation right), which allows you to quote short excerpts, provided they accurately represent the original text and you acknowledge the source. But unlike in the US this is only valid for texts, not for other copyrighted material like movies. ( This means that youtube remixes are most likely illegal in germany.)
Tichy 14y ago
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?
sherr 14y ago
The Economist talked about this a week ago in an article : "Taxing times As newspapers’ woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make Google pay for the news it publishes" Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the intended consequences : http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspapers-woes-grow-some-are-lobbying-politicians-make-google-pay-news-it http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Interesting and sad. I don't know if it is possible but I am wondering if such a law could include an 'opt out' policy. Something which said to search engines and the like that they are allowed to snippet your articles. Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled. My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out" group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this scheme was a "good" idea.
- sorich87 14y ago
  robots.txt ?
  - schabernakk 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
Zash 14y ago
This is scary? I expected Nazi zombies!
durbin 14y ago
Belgian papers sued Google a few years ago over similar uses of their content. It sort of backfired on them when google stopped crawling their pages. The internet and Google are more powerful than the German print media. http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-anger-at-google-move/ http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-a...
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  What a great article. So brief, yet so much justice. Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.
  - alex_c 14y ago
    >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.
    - guessWhy 14y ago
      Invalid generalization. If you want money to be part of the index, they should be able to remove you.
    - tharris0101 14y ago
      I get what you're saying but in this specific instance, Google was right to delete them from news.google and the general index. The newspapers can't have it both ways (pay us to show up on Google News but keep us for free on Google Search).
    - slurgfest 14y ago
      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.
      - 14y ago
css771 14y ago
Why is it that every time that something like this happens, Google is the only tech company that comes forward with a message? Doesn't having a free and open internet benefit any other company?
- bowyakka 14y ago
  I feel that its because google is of a size where the idea of getting a letter from its lawyers is a scary prospect.
Shorel 14y ago
I 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.
- derleth 14y ago
  > 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.
dschiptsov 14y ago
They should google ''Wyatt's Torch'' before voting.)
zwieback 14y ago
Technology generally finds a way around poorly written laws but I think there is a real underlying problem. Google News has become its own thing now. The headlines, snippets and icons I get from a variety of newspapers is often enough to skim over the day's news and I only click on maybe one or two stories for more in-depth reading. I think a way for Google to charge news sources and for news sources to charge Google both make sense but they have to be developed by willing participants, not by legislators.
lenni 14y ago
FWIW, I've written to my member of parliament [0], expressed my dissatisfaction and asked him to oppose the law. He wrote back saying hat his parliamentary party is already opposing this law but for slightly different reasons: It won't increase the quality of journalism and will just create a flood of lawsuits. Lastly it is far too vaguely phrased as to not have grave side effects. The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament. Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ..."). [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele
- bijant 14y ago
  fuck ströbele ! he voted in favor of the war in afghanistan and yet he still participates in all the peace rallies. He's just another lying corrupted politician
mtgx 14y ago
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.
- schabernakk 14y ago
  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.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    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?
    - schabernakk 14y ago
      People closer to the pirate party might disagree, but from my outside perspective it has much to do with procedural problems the very nature of the party brings with them. They are primarily concerned with themselves. Lets take flat hierarchy goal for example: A good thing in theory which leads to a very tiring process when it comes to making decisions. On the last big conference for example there was a last minute petition for the further research of time travel. And it has to be discussed. Sure, it was dismissed relatively quickly and it was meant as a joke but those were 30 minutes lost for good. Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, they are missing likable leading figures (a concept they dont really like). Head of the pirates Bernd Schloemer for example is more of a silent leader. One of the most famous pirates Christoph Lauer comes across as rude, uninterested and smug. A social behaviour 101 wouldnt be that bad for some of the members.
      - bijant 14y ago
EGreg 14y ago
I'm sure some lawmakers have heard of robots.txt, so what is their rationale?
- geon 14y ago
  Greed?
EGreg 14y ago
I think our decentralized streams protocol should solve this kind of thing. Basically RSS with push and access controls. You subscribe to a feed and get pushes / pulls as long as you are paying it. Why isn't there a standard protocol for this on the web?
yk 14y ago
IANAL but trying to read the law, it seems to be a rather blatant lex google.[1] They specifically state "search engine or similar services" should be prohibited from (in an extreme interpretation) linking to newspapers, if they do not pay. ( The rest of the law is probably just redundant, since it seems to reimplement copyright for a small subset of already copyrighted material.) [1]http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf (German) [EDIT: spelling]
- richardjordan 14y ago
  Google should state a new policy. We're not going to spend our money on servers and bandwidth indexing and linking to German publishers who won't pay - I guarantee you the value of the traffic they get from Google dwarfs what Google gets back from them in terms of marginal revenue directly attributable to their content. That's the thing about Google. They make tons of money - but given that they're a prime mover of traffic around the Internet they make a damn site more money for other folks - including newspapers. So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with termination fees and call it a wash.
kleiba 14y ago
Frankly, I can understand the publisher's point, but I'm surprised that they do not seem to see how this could backfire if Google simply stopped crawling their sites. But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a search.
cdooh 14y ago
Do they really thing this will stop the continuing decline of their newspapers?
morsch 14y ago
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.
- zmmmmm 14y ago
  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.
  - ajuc 14y ago
    Step 4. Only commercial sites from Germany are in Google, cause it's too much paperwork to have all these fees canceled if you're not doing this full time. Both Google and newspapers in Germany are glad from such resolution, only some naive young people complain about something. They're surely pirates.
jhund 14y ago
The 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.
- richardjordan 14y ago
  Exactly right. I made a similar point here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886376 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886376 Media companies are in the attention harvesting business NOT in the information delivery business. The marginal value of the information product is virtually zero. The marginal value of attention redirected to ads is some rate greater than zero - some rate greater than the cost of delivering that information product. So profit can be made. But the power is in delivering the attention, not the information.
ommunist 14y ago
Nothing scary, they just are aiming carefully to shoot their own buttocks with some good German schrapnel. If there will be no readership for them, they will not be able to sell ads and die in 3-5 years, depending on long term contracts. And this is a good thing. Since you can use free Russian and Urdu headlines for free! Oh, I forgot to mention Chinese.
opminion 14y ago
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.
- ripperdoc 14y ago
  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...
  - opminion 14y ago
    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).
ripperdoc 14y ago
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.
- richardjordan 14y ago
  Right. Back in the pre-web days when I was a mere teen I would spend breakfast, and often late afternoon going through the English broadsheet newspapers. Usually back to front to read the sports first. But the key is that the first read, the morning one, involved skimming articles for their gist and reading the ones that interested me. The afternoon session possibly involved reading more, due to boredom. The real problem the newspapers have is that most of the articles they produce fail the skim test. I don't want to read more. I get the gist. I'm not interested. If they're good I click through and read them on the original site... often then clicking to other things I find there. Win for the Google link to them. If it's a hot topic I'll often read many articles from many pubs on the same topic. But in a world with so many news sources the truth is they don't stand out, I am not going to check a thousand sources very day, or even ten. So I'm not going to wade through to find the things I'm interested in. If they don't want their headings and summaries in Google I don't care about their product. And I'm a Google user. I pay Google's bills. I don't want them raising my rates in other areas to pay publishers for links to content that I may skim over and never want to read in depth. Why should my costs for Google - in terms of what they can deliver me for all that surplus attention of mine they harvest over a year - go up to subsidize failing newspapers producing product for which the market rate doesn't support their costs?
- boboblong 14y ago
  But it's Google who's making a big deal out of this, not the publishers. They could have just delisted the publishers without a peep.
boboblong 14y ago
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.
- dexen 14y ago
  > 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).
conanite 14y ago
It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?
- belorn 14y ago
  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.
  - boboblong 14y ago
    So, in other words, the posters defending Google are being totally disingenuous when they claim that Google couldn't care less about these petulant little publishers and that the publishers need Google far more than vice versa. Apparently, Google really doesn't want to take these publishers off Google News.
- netcan 14y ago
  Why would that kill the law? All it would do is make Google news useless for German news.
  - conanite 14y ago
    My guess is that if newspaper sites lose a big chunk of their traffic they might reconsider who should be paying whom. I'm also guessing that without support from newspapers, the law is less likely to get through.
    - netcan 14y ago
      Presumably the newspapers are aware this might happen happen. Then (in their minds) people will just go to the actual newspaper to see the headlines.
netcan 14y ago
I'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.
- digeridoo 14y ago
  Not all bad. http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neutrality-law-passes-senate http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neu...
  - netcan 14y ago
    Thanks. It's relevant though that nothing like this is likely to come from the EU itself.
- contingencies 14y ago
  Re: 'Disappointed with Europe', please see recent FOIAs to the privacy body http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/edps http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/edps and subsequent to 'Home Affairs' (new EU body, ~immediately after introduction rubber-stamped US-friendly surveillance laws) at http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/dg_home http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/dg_home EU had, and perhaps still has, the promise of a strong political body as a counter-balance to US and Chinese interests in the world. IMHO the promise is rapidly fading though, under what appears to be high-level influence and manipulation that demonstrably favours US-friendly outcomes. This is not a new phenomenon. Tried to integrate results with Wikipedia, contacted the EFF, forwarded to journalists, nobody will write up the results. Trying reputable university-affiliated Wikinews journalists now. :/
travisjtodd 14y ago
This 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.
hso9791 14y ago
The proper term for pushing this law is "rent-seeking". You must include our content, and you must pay us for it. This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all for an even better cause. German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.
- richardjordan 14y ago
  If the newspapers could make a profit putting pictures of cats riding unicorns on every page with any text written in swahili, they'd do it every day it worked for them and not give a damn about the societal benefit - they'd cry that they're businesses and they've got to be allowed to make a profit. This is exactly what's happened over the decades as they cut international staff, and investigative staff and focused on lifestyle and entertainment news more and more.
- boboblong 14y ago
  >You must include our content, and you must pay us for it. Where are you getting the first part from?
richardjordan 14y ago
This ultimately comes down to the fact that newspapers are going out of business because not enough people want to buy them any more, and they're lashing out in desperation. I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay in two ways - direct purchasing, and delivering surplus attention beyond that required to consume the media, which can be redirected towards various forms of advertising. When you cannot run your business on advertising revenue alone it means that not enough people are giving enough surplus attention of enough value to cover. This argument about the "inherent value" of one form of content or another - of the need to pay artists or creators, or in this case journalists - doesn't extend to other realms. If I decide I want to be a carpenter, I cannot build a table and demand someone buy that table for $1,000. If the market won't bear that price for the table then the government isn't going to force others to pay me $1,000 because I feel that's what it's "worth". The market rates for all forms of media have plummeted due to there being more supply of attention-draining media than there is demand either in terms of hard-dollars in direct payment, or surplus attention to be redirected towards paid advertising (and its ilk). When old media companies had a stranglehold on distribution because paper production and distribution was expensive, or video production costs were prohibitive, only a small elite were able to publish their opinions, and the monopolistic distributors were able to charge a premium for the limited access to information or entertainment they provided. They weren't paid well because they provided an outstanding product (though it often was), they were paid well because they limited supply. Those limits are gone. Many many people produce entertainment and informational content. Many do it just for fun and are happy not to get paid. Many more do it with the hope of getting paid anything without the expectation of the lavish salaries and expense accounts of journalists of old. This undercuts their economics and doesn't even touch on the fact that the newer voices often offer media that is more attractive to younger audiences. Not to mention declining quality of the product in many cases. Many media companies as they've become bloated monstrosities have undermined their own product quality with short-term-profit-focused decision making which had long term harm. Is it really the case that piracy accounts for all problems in a record industry where the giants spent the pre-Internet-boom '90s crushing independent labels, monopolizing market channels and creating a modern-day payola system on radio where programming was rigidly sliced and diced to the lowest common denominator? Is none of the loss of popularity of the New York Times down to their abandoning their predominantly liberal subscriber audience during the Bush years and being guilty of mis-leading story after mis-leading story in the build up to the Iraq War, destroying people's confidence in their role as a reliable neutral arbiter? tl;dr The publishers referenced by the OP aren't happy at the market rate for their product and services and want government to rig the market to pay them a cushy wage. Such subsidies rarely save industries in the long term, and the public should be outraged - because legislation of this sort is a public subsidy on a privileged elite in no uncertain terms.
b1daly 14y ago
I think the intuition behind these proposed laws is that Google has become so dominant in providing the information substrate of society that it should be subject to regulation as a monopoly. The argument would be something along the lines that search works best when provided as one comprehensive resource. Therefore, as a natural monopoly it should be regulated for similar reasons that other utilities are (electricity, water). The publishers are trying to make a case that their product has value as a "public good." Classical economic theory says market forces alone will produce a sub-optimal supply of a public good with out regulation. Something like that. It's not a totally implausible argument. It does seem notable to me that Google is able to extract value from content that the creators can't.
daniel-cussen 14y ago
The reason newspapers are sacrificing their credibility for money is quite simply because they're running out of money faster than they are running out of credibility.
bijant 14y ago
what is really scary is not the proposed law but the public relation campaign google is mounting against it. It is a (very likely) unprecedented internet lobbying effort involving not only googles advertising network, but also a link on google.de (no longer visible). To a casual observer, watching the short youtube clip or reading the campaign slogan "Willst Du auch in Zukunft finden, was Du suchst?"("Do you want to continue to find what you're searching for ?") it could seem like the government was trying to shut down google search. It seems like a scary prospect to think of the ways google, a private company, could start to use its unparralled reach to lobby for legislation in its favor around the entire globe.

338 points by gorm 14y ago

503. Here's the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://martinweigert.com/something-really-scary-is-going-on-in-germany/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

pavel_lishin 14y ago
I didn't listen much in high school English; is linking to a Google cache of this blog post ironic?
- sukuriant 14y ago
  No. When a site is down, it is customary on Hacker News for someone to go to Google and get the last cached (saved) version of the web-page from them to post it those that can't access it to read, as a sort of convenience. It's also common for the plaintext of the article to be posted here.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    I meant that it seems like precisely the sort of thing that would be outlawed by the proposed legislation.
- kibwen 14y ago
  Only if it was a blog post lobbying in favor of the law.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

schabernakk 14y ago

To 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 time back regarding internet filters. 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. I applaud google for their efforts (and I am fully aware of their commercial interests in this matter) but I slowly begin to think they did their cause a disservice. If a discussion takes place its always about google and their lobbying. The extend of this law which could lead to bloggers being sued (btw: a side effect of the very fuzzy written law which leaves a lot open and almost certainly will need a court to decide on the details) when they link to news articles is almost never mentioned. One last thing: 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 wont cut it. Perhaps something like a "culture/media tax/flatrate" as we currently have with the GEZ (for the financing of the public tv stations)? I dont know, but the #lsr is certainly not the way to go. [1]http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergleicht-google-mit-den-taliban-1212-96172.html http://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-springer-vergl...

leoh 14y ago
"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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

danmaz74 14y ago

I'm very curious to know how they would determine how much Google should pay, and how to distribute that money to the different publishers. Anyway, I think that Google, if the law is passed, should refuse to pay and stop publishing news from publishers from Germany (there are always still Austrian and Swiss newspapers for German news).

schabernakk 14y ago
Just because they share the same language doesnt mean the journalistic quality regarding local/national news is equal. A german newspaper will always be more detailed and in-depth when it comes to national matters.
- danmaz74 14y ago
  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.
  - schabernakk 14y ago
    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.
    - jfoutz 14y ago
      I would imagine the bulk of traffic comes from headline news. Some people check the paper every day, some people catch a bit of news on the bus or TV or whatever, then google it. I think the rest of the traffic historical articles, looked up by people trying to win arguments on the internet. I don't know how many times i've been pulled to the NYT because of that sort of behavior. I would guess all of that traffic comes from google.
    - 14y ago

api 14y ago

If they succeed they will simply remove themselves from the discourse and accelerate their obsolescence.

Tichy 14y ago
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 experiment and would kill small publishers.
- jamesjporter 14y ago
  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?
  - Tichy 14y ago
    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 necessary to make it work for search engines.
    - atuttle 14y ago
      AFAIK this is the way to go: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_works
  - zmmmmm 14y ago

sdoering 14y ago

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 really, really bad, is the fact, that the law is so fuzzy, that everyone quoting from another source might be potentially liable. This law is so bad, because it just might kill the independent voices. And I think there might be a reason for this. Because the press oftentimes has no incentive to dig deeper, to ask critical questions, when it comes to the really important questions, this job is left for the independent voices, that do this out of a feeling of necessity. But if these voices are silenced through fear... ... well, I think you get the drift. And I know, this sounds a lot like conspiracy - and I am not saying, my thoughts come anywhere near the truth, but I just wanted to share the thought. Just one example: The so called "Netzsperren" (blocking sites, because of content with filter-lists - aka censorship) were reported by the big media as being bad, after a lot of independent bloggers had written about it and the discussion just could not be "ignored" any longer.

LinXitoW 14y ago
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.
- sdoering 14y ago
  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...

R_Edward 14y ago

Is there no such thing as Fair Use in German copyright law?

kibwen 14y ago
"While many other countries recognize similar exceptions to copyright, only the United States and Israel fully recognize the concept of fair use." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationally http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Influence_internationa...
- dmayle 14y ago
  This is entirely misleading, because it makes it seem like the policies in other countries is questionable with regards to fair use, or perhaps with lesser rights. In France, for example, there is no such thing as fair use, but that's only because 'fair use' in the US is not defined as what you're allowed to do, however, but as a sort of vague statement about perhaps being able to use things. In France, it is strictly codified: You are able to make private showings of copyrighted material You are allowed to make private copies (with a few exceptions, e.g. software backups allowed, but copying your poster so you can hang it in two different rooms is illegal, as is copying your software to two different computers so two different people can use it) You can make copies of non-educational works for educational uses (ie. no photocopying textbooks, but you can copy yesterday's newspaper article all you want) Parody Citations Etc.

neumann_alfred 14y ago

From the first comment on that: "What’s wrong with newspapers being paid for the content that they produce? No one has to use their headlines if they don’t want to pay for it." What about fair use? Does that exist in Germany? I'm a quote geek for example. I love collecting "favourite quotes", giving a source (link if possible). I started out with the general quotes everybody knows, but of course I also copy and paste from the web in general, and sometimes I actually type what I read in a book, and translate it to English. Man, I even love talking about it. I love quotes. Now, I consider that "fair use", and since I do it mostly in English the noobs left me alone so far. But I don't even know if there is such a thing as fair use in Germany... any ideas?

kibwen 14y ago
In the spirit of DRY, here's a link to the a comment of mine, 200 pixels away on this very page, answering that exact question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4883289 But I suppose I really should have refactored the comment out into a top-level comment and linked to it from both. :)
- neumann_alfred 14y ago
  Okay, that kinda leaves Israel since I'd never move to the US :P Thanks!
yk 14y ago
There is the "Zitatrecht" (quotation right), which allows you to quote short excerpts, provided they accurately represent the original text and you acknowledge the source. But unlike in the US this is only valid for texts, not for other copyrighted material like movies. ( This means that youtube remixes are most likely illegal in germany.)

Tichy 14y ago

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?

sherr 14y ago

The Economist talked about this a week ago in an article : "Taxing times As newspapers’ woes grow, some are lobbying politicians to make Google pay for the news it publishes" Not necessarily the end of the world (see Brasil) but might not have the intended consequences : http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspapers-woes-grow-some-are-lobbying-politicians-make-google-pay-news-it http://www.economist.com/news/international/21565928-newspap...

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Interesting and sad. I don't know if it is possible but I am wondering if such a law could include an 'opt out' policy. Something which said to search engines and the like that they are allowed to snippet your articles. Then have Google turn off indexing of everything that doesn't have opt-out enabled. My expectation would be that the opt-out publications would flourish and the ones who had opted "in" would quickly die or decide to join the "opt out" group. I can't imagine anyone looking at their referrer links would think this scheme was a "good" idea.

sorich87 14y ago
robots.txt ?
- schabernakk 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.

Zash 14y ago

This is scary? I expected Nazi zombies!

durbin 14y ago

Belgian papers sued Google a few years ago over similar uses of their content. It sort of backfired on them when google stopped crawling their pages. The internet and Google are more powerful than the German print media. http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-anger-at-google-move/ http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/07/18/belgian-papers-a...

sliverstorm 14y ago
What a great article. So brief, yet so much justice. Ok, ok, also a little bit of schadenfreude.
- alex_c 14y ago
  >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.
  - guessWhy 14y ago
    Invalid generalization. If you want money to be part of the index, they should be able to remove you.
  - tharris0101 14y ago
    I get what you're saying but in this specific instance, Google was right to delete them from news.google and the general index. The newspapers can't have it both ways (pay us to show up on Google News but keep us for free on Google Search).
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    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.
    - 14y ago

css771 14y ago

Why is it that every time that something like this happens, Google is the only tech company that comes forward with a message? Doesn't having a free and open internet benefit any other company?

bowyakka 14y ago
I feel that its because google is of a size where the idea of getting a letter from its lawyers is a scary prospect.

Shorel 14y ago

I 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.

derleth 14y ago
> 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.

dschiptsov 14y ago

They should google ''Wyatt's Torch'' before voting.)

zwieback 14y ago

Technology generally finds a way around poorly written laws but I think there is a real underlying problem. Google News has become its own thing now. The headlines, snippets and icons I get from a variety of newspapers is often enough to skim over the day's news and I only click on maybe one or two stories for more in-depth reading. I think a way for Google to charge news sources and for news sources to charge Google both make sense but they have to be developed by willing participants, not by legislators.

lenni 14y ago

FWIW, I've written to my member of parliament [0], expressed my dissatisfaction and asked him to oppose the law. He wrote back saying hat his parliamentary party is already opposing this law but for slightly different reasons: It won't increase the quality of journalism and will just create a flood of lawsuits. Lastly it is far too vaguely phrased as to not have grave side effects. The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament. Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ..."). [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Christian_Str%C3%B6bele

bijant 14y ago
fuck ströbele ! he voted in favor of the war in afghanistan and yet he still participates in all the peace rallies. He's just another lying corrupted politician

mtgx 14y ago

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.

schabernakk 14y ago
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.
- mtgx 14y ago
  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?
  - schabernakk 14y ago
    People closer to the pirate party might disagree, but from my outside perspective it has much to do with procedural problems the very nature of the party brings with them. They are primarily concerned with themselves. Lets take flat hierarchy goal for example: A good thing in theory which leads to a very tiring process when it comes to making decisions. On the last big conference for example there was a last minute petition for the further research of time travel. And it has to be discussed. Sure, it was dismissed relatively quickly and it was meant as a joke but those were 30 minutes lost for good. Apart from that, and this is just my personal opinion, they are missing likable leading figures (a concept they dont really like). Head of the pirates Bernd Schloemer for example is more of a silent leader. One of the most famous pirates Christoph Lauer comes across as rude, uninterested and smug. A social behaviour 101 wouldnt be that bad for some of the members.
    - bijant 14y ago

EGreg 14y ago

I'm sure some lawmakers have heard of robots.txt, so what is their rationale?

geon 14y ago
Greed?

EGreg 14y ago

I think our decentralized streams protocol should solve this kind of thing. Basically RSS with push and access controls. You subscribe to a feed and get pushes / pulls as long as you are paying it. Why isn't there a standard protocol for this on the web?

yk 14y ago

IANAL but trying to read the law, it seems to be a rather blatant lex google.[1] They specifically state "search engine or similar services" should be prohibited from (in an extreme interpretation) linking to newspapers, if they do not pay. ( The rest of the law is probably just redundant, since it seems to reimplement copyright for a small subset of already copyrighted material.) [1]http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/114/1711470.pdf (German) [EDIT: spelling]

richardjordan 14y ago
Google should state a new policy. We're not going to spend our money on servers and bandwidth indexing and linking to German publishers who won't pay - I guarantee you the value of the traffic they get from Google dwarfs what Google gets back from them in terms of marginal revenue directly attributable to their content. That's the thing about Google. They make tons of money - but given that they're a prime mover of traffic around the Internet they make a damn site more money for other folks - including newspapers. So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with termination fees and call it a wash.

kleiba 14y ago

Frankly, I can understand the publisher's point, but I'm surprised that they do not seem to see how this could backfire if Google simply stopped crawling their sites. But what's more: I think if this law became a reality it wouldn't affect my personal web usage at all. News sites are about the only type of website left where I still type in the URL and go to the page directly instead of doing a search.

cdooh 14y ago

Do they really thing this will stop the continuing decline of their newspapers?

morsch 14y ago

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.

zmmmmm 14y ago
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.
- ajuc 14y ago
  Step 4. Only commercial sites from Germany are in Google, cause it's too much paperwork to have all these fees canceled if you're not doing this full time. Both Google and newspapers in Germany are glad from such resolution, only some naive young people complain about something. They're surely pirates.

jhund 14y ago

The 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.

richardjordan 14y ago
Exactly right. I made a similar point here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886376 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886376 Media companies are in the attention harvesting business NOT in the information delivery business. The marginal value of the information product is virtually zero. The marginal value of attention redirected to ads is some rate greater than zero - some rate greater than the cost of delivering that information product. So profit can be made. But the power is in delivering the attention, not the information.

ommunist 14y ago

Nothing scary, they just are aiming carefully to shoot their own buttocks with some good German schrapnel. If there will be no readership for them, they will not be able to sell ads and die in 3-5 years, depending on long term contracts. And this is a good thing. Since you can use free Russian and Urdu headlines for free! Oh, I forgot to mention Chinese.

opminion 14y ago

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.

ripperdoc 14y ago
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...
- opminion 14y ago
  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).

ripperdoc 14y ago

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.

richardjordan 14y ago
Right. Back in the pre-web days when I was a mere teen I would spend breakfast, and often late afternoon going through the English broadsheet newspapers. Usually back to front to read the sports first. But the key is that the first read, the morning one, involved skimming articles for their gist and reading the ones that interested me. The afternoon session possibly involved reading more, due to boredom. The real problem the newspapers have is that most of the articles they produce fail the skim test. I don't want to read more. I get the gist. I'm not interested. If they're good I click through and read them on the original site... often then clicking to other things I find there. Win for the Google link to them. If it's a hot topic I'll often read many articles from many pubs on the same topic. But in a world with so many news sources the truth is they don't stand out, I am not going to check a thousand sources very day, or even ten. So I'm not going to wade through to find the things I'm interested in. If they don't want their headings and summaries in Google I don't care about their product. And I'm a Google user. I pay Google's bills. I don't want them raising my rates in other areas to pay publishers for links to content that I may skim over and never want to read in depth. Why should my costs for Google - in terms of what they can deliver me for all that surplus attention of mine they harvest over a year - go up to subsidize failing newspapers producing product for which the market rate doesn't support their costs?
boboblong 14y ago
But it's Google who's making a big deal out of this, not the publishers. They could have just delisted the publishers without a peep.

boboblong 14y ago

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.

dexen 14y ago
> 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).

conanite 14y ago

It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?

belorn 14y ago
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.
- boboblong 14y ago
  So, in other words, the posters defending Google are being totally disingenuous when they claim that Google couldn't care less about these petulant little publishers and that the publishers need Google far more than vice versa. Apparently, Google really doesn't want to take these publishers off Google News.
netcan 14y ago
Why would that kill the law? All it would do is make Google news useless for German news.
- conanite 14y ago
  My guess is that if newspaper sites lose a big chunk of their traffic they might reconsider who should be paying whom. I'm also guessing that without support from newspapers, the law is less likely to get through.
  - netcan 14y ago
    Presumably the newspapers are aware this might happen happen. Then (in their minds) people will just go to the actual newspaper to see the headlines.

netcan 14y ago

I'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.

digeridoo 14y ago
Not all bad. http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neutrality-law-passes-senate http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/9/3009157/netherlands-net-neu...
- netcan 14y ago
  Thanks. It's relevant though that nothing like this is likely to come from the EU itself.
contingencies 14y ago
Re: 'Disappointed with Europe', please see recent FOIAs to the privacy body http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/edps http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/edps and subsequent to 'Home Affairs' (new EU body, ~immediately after introduction rubber-stamped US-friendly surveillance laws) at http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/dg_home http://www.asktheeu.org/en/body/dg_home EU had, and perhaps still has, the promise of a strong political body as a counter-balance to US and Chinese interests in the world. IMHO the promise is rapidly fading though, under what appears to be high-level influence and manipulation that demonstrably favours US-friendly outcomes. This is not a new phenomenon. Tried to integrate results with Wikipedia, contacted the EFF, forwarded to journalists, nobody will write up the results. Trying reputable university-affiliated Wikinews journalists now. :/

travisjtodd 14y ago

This 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.

hso9791 14y ago

The proper term for pushing this law is "rent-seeking". You must include our content, and you must pay us for it. This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all for an even better cause. German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.

richardjordan 14y ago
If the newspapers could make a profit putting pictures of cats riding unicorns on every page with any text written in swahili, they'd do it every day it worked for them and not give a damn about the societal benefit - they'd cry that they're businesses and they've got to be allowed to make a profit. This is exactly what's happened over the decades as they cut international staff, and investigative staff and focused on lifestyle and entertainment news more and more.
boboblong 14y ago
>You must include our content, and you must pay us for it. Where are you getting the first part from?

richardjordan 14y ago

This ultimately comes down to the fact that newspapers are going out of business because not enough people want to buy them any more, and they're lashing out in desperation. I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay in two ways - direct purchasing, and delivering surplus attention beyond that required to consume the media, which can be redirected towards various forms of advertising. When you cannot run your business on advertising revenue alone it means that not enough people are giving enough surplus attention of enough value to cover. This argument about the "inherent value" of one form of content or another - of the need to pay artists or creators, or in this case journalists - doesn't extend to other realms. If I decide I want to be a carpenter, I cannot build a table and demand someone buy that table for $1,000. If the market won't bear that price for the table then the government isn't going to force others to pay me $1,000 because I feel that's what it's "worth". The market rates for all forms of media have plummeted due to there being more supply of attention-draining media than there is demand either in terms of hard-dollars in direct payment, or surplus attention to be redirected towards paid advertising (and its ilk). When old media companies had a stranglehold on distribution because paper production and distribution was expensive, or video production costs were prohibitive, only a small elite were able to publish their opinions, and the monopolistic distributors were able to charge a premium for the limited access to information or entertainment they provided. They weren't paid well because they provided an outstanding product (though it often was), they were paid well because they limited supply. Those limits are gone. Many many people produce entertainment and informational content. Many do it just for fun and are happy not to get paid. Many more do it with the hope of getting paid anything without the expectation of the lavish salaries and expense accounts of journalists of old. This undercuts their economics and doesn't even touch on the fact that the newer voices often offer media that is more attractive to younger audiences. Not to mention declining quality of the product in many cases. Many media companies as they've become bloated monstrosities have undermined their own product quality with short-term-profit-focused decision making which had long term harm. Is it really the case that piracy accounts for all problems in a record industry where the giants spent the pre-Internet-boom '90s crushing independent labels, monopolizing market channels and creating a modern-day payola system on radio where programming was rigidly sliced and diced to the lowest common denominator? Is none of the loss of popularity of the New York Times down to their abandoning their predominantly liberal subscriber audience during the Bush years and being guilty of mis-leading story after mis-leading story in the build up to the Iraq War, destroying people's confidence in their role as a reliable neutral arbiter? tl;dr The publishers referenced by the OP aren't happy at the market rate for their product and services and want government to rig the market to pay them a cushy wage. Such subsidies rarely save industries in the long term, and the public should be outraged - because legislation of this sort is a public subsidy on a privileged elite in no uncertain terms.

b1daly 14y ago

I think the intuition behind these proposed laws is that Google has become so dominant in providing the information substrate of society that it should be subject to regulation as a monopoly. The argument would be something along the lines that search works best when provided as one comprehensive resource. Therefore, as a natural monopoly it should be regulated for similar reasons that other utilities are (electricity, water). The publishers are trying to make a case that their product has value as a "public good." Classical economic theory says market forces alone will produce a sub-optimal supply of a public good with out regulation. Something like that. It's not a totally implausible argument. It does seem notable to me that Google is able to extract value from content that the creators can't.

daniel-cussen 14y ago

The reason newspapers are sacrificing their credibility for money is quite simply because they're running out of money faster than they are running out of credibility.

bijant 14y ago

what is really scary is not the proposed law but the public relation campaign google is mounting against it. It is a (very likely) unprecedented internet lobbying effort involving not only googles advertising network, but also a link on google.de (no longer visible). To a casual observer, watching the short youtube clip or reading the campaign slogan "Willst Du auch in Zukunft finden, was Du suchst?"("Do you want to continue to find what you're searching for ?") it could seem like the government was trying to shut down google search. It seems like a scary prospect to think of the ways google, a private company, could start to use its unparralled reach to lobby for legislation in its favor around the entire globe.