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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016."

I've often thought all web search engines would be considered grotesquely illegal if they hadn't been there since the beginning, but only started today. It is at times a fragile existence as it is even so.

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You're right. In germany there is a law called "Leistungsschutzrecht" that makes it illegal to publish snippets of news stories of the big publishing houses especially in search results such as google news. After some months the publishers realised that now they weren't getting as much pageviews as before (go figure) and granted google an exclusive license to publish their stuff. So now there is a law that would require any new search engine to make deals with every major newspaper in germany. On the other hand we do not have such a thing as fair use, so I imagine that image search is an endless ongoing lawsuit in germany, as every image thumbnail is illegal publishing of copyrighted material.

Gosh, don't even get me started. Some laws here in germany are basically hostile towards web-development projects. At least the ones where you either have: user generated content or aggregated content from other services, sites or sources. Not that it would be illegal per se, but you would have to take care of so many things, that you would always wander on a very small grate grate between legal and illegal.

The "Leistungsschutzrecht" is really only the tip of the Scheißberg.

Well I'm slightly proud to know there's at least one first world country with dumber copyright laws than my own.

Being second from the bottom probably is nothing to crow about though...

Well, it seems stupidity abounds in a lot of countries when it comes to copyright. The supreme court of Sweden just ruled that taking a photo of a piece of public art (as in art in an open and public space, not even a gallery or museum mind you) and posting online infringes on the artist's copyright.

Oh, at least thirds. Spain is even in worst situation; Google News closed Spain service[1] since they considered unacceptable to pay for providing links.

Spain has had a bunch of "interesting" laws for copyright protection. Like having to pay a tax for any HD, DVD (whatever thing you use to store stuff and per MB) as a preemptive pirate protection. And I think that other European countries shared this strategy[2].

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/enrique-dans/google-news-leavi... [2] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/digital-tax-opposed-sp...

Oh, yeah, Sweden got that too. A "nice" organization called copyswede that tries to claim that all digital media is used for storing music, so we must pay a tax, per MB, for all storage media. The irony of it all, since Spotify, a Swedish company, we're not even storing music anymore.

There are various countries with that kind of tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy .Somehow Austria is missing on this List but I'am pretty sure they already have it ( http://futurezone.at/english/there-is-no-right-to-private-co... ).

Lots of countries, including the US, have a similar tax on certain blank media The tax collected by the govt, and distributed to content producers. What a racket.

New Zealand banned Software Patents

The publishers were worried about Google getting too much power over them, so set up a system that effectively prevents any new aggregators competing with Google. Classic. The publishers in Spain did something similar.

It reminds me of something Paul Thurrott said soon after Apple brought out the iPhone: They must look at these bumbling boobs that are their competitors, and they must be as happy as can be.

I'm just curious, did you mean that Germany really doesn't have fair use or not safe harbor?

No, germany really doesn't have fair use. Which is a golden opportunity for some lawyers to make some cash.

While they don't have a single rule similiar to fair use they do have a long list of exceptions to copyright, including educational use, technical necessity, written and spoken political commentary, citations, and private use. In some cases more usuable than fair use, in some cases not.

Before the recent introduction of the Leistungsschutzrecht, Google News was completely legal to operate.

IANAL but I doubt that it was completely legal. See this case for an example of a non-google news aggregator pre "Leistungsschutzrecht": http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/start-up-offline-verlage-...

This is more of a case of legal bullying than anything. The Paperboy and Perlentaucher decisions have been rather clear on that matter. There have been also decisions that 10 word snippets or so are fine under citation rules.

(Ok, "completely legal" was a bit of an overstatement. It's not explicitely allowed and you would probably need large enough legal fund to defend yourself.)

Same with public libraries, for that matter. Can you imagine the hue and cry that the major publishers would raise if someone were just now suggesting buying one copy of a book for the express purpose of lending it to hundreds of readers? Or worse, having the government pay for it?

They'd be burning up the telephone lines to Washington and hiring lobbyists by the trainload.

Just imagine how big their outcry would be if it was new thatyou could lend a friend your book by just giving it to them in person. Now suddenly he and his friends will not buy that book and read its content for free. That would also be considered piracy and surely forbidden as well. Some digital laws are just ridiculous.

Yes but there is enough friction with public libraries that that was never an issue. Also noting that many expensive books (or directories) have a market in selling to public libraries. Plus remember that only one person can take out a book at one time (unless multiple copies) and books take time to read so the impact is not the same as with digital works (you have to get to the library to take the book out and there are limits to how many you can borrow is another factor).

Another example might be robodialers if they hadn't been preceded by actual people making calls, which was preceded by people not being able to dial that many calls (rotary phone dialing is slow) and before that even needing an actual operator to complete a "sales" call.

All of the above certainly made it less annoying than it is today. Noting that there is no "do not call" list for businesses.

I think the use case has been well cemented into "free use" & "transformative" in the US now, especially post Google Books. In the EU, however, there's nothing to suggest to me that a search engine would be legal. Here's a report about content mining in the EU http://www.scienceeurope.org/uploads/PublicDocumentsAndSpeec...

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