The German Parliament passed a law, which will force search engines such as Google and other news aggregators, to pay royalties to publishers for posting extracts of their articles.
The text exempts individual words or “single words or small text passages” although it does not state how short a passage has to be to be royalty-free.
If a passage needs to be shorter than a headline to be royalty-free, the law is likely to lead to the removal of all German news publications from Google search results, the Telegraph reports.
The bill still needs upper-house approval, and is expected to meet resistance.
Germany’s coalition government was the driver behind the law, and the main opposition, the SPD, has said that it will try to defeat the law in the country’s second legislative chamber, the Bundesrat.
Google has been a vocal opponent of the law, the paper said.
According to the website Gigaom, in France and Belgium the search giant has settled similar disputes with publishers in deals that many have regarded seen as tantamount to a payoff, the paper added.
Keywords: German Parliament, Google, German News publication
If they charge for the articles, Google must charge them back for
advertising their articles. This is ridiculous. Google does not copy
material and put it up as its own. It makes their links visible in a
search, so in the end viewers are directed to that newspaper website!
What is wrong in this? This is like charging an over-enthusiastic yellow
pages for advertising a brand for free!
One day Google will go for paid service, How long one can access news for free, They are people(journalist) working for news.
Good move by Germany.
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