Google launches “Defend Your Net” campaign in Germany against copyright plans
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Budnestag is German parliament, not government. This would be clear, if the author made an effort and read article's snippet, which is cited in his/her own article:
"Later this month a proposed new section to the German Copyright Act is due to be discussed in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag. "
Comming back to merit. I am not specialist, but this legislation is not that stupid as it may sound.
It gives content providers a chance to earn money in other way then putting ads on their websites - ads are good for Google, but not for us because of privacy violation, user tracking and similar practices. Collected data are available on request for FBI, CIA and similar agencies in other countries.
Right now "content aggregators" take for free what they want, as a result those, who provide valuable content are loosing money.
This hits society, since professional journalism is in the decline. We get mostly gossips, unchecked revelation, stupid interpretation of scientific results or advertisers-driven content.
If nobody is able to finance investigative journalism, then it is clear danger for freedom.
On the other hand this regulation does not hit education, general access to knowladge, since content is protected only for a year.
(At least I think that's your complaint, and not a nitpick of how they explained that Bundestag is an official body.)
Back to the merit of the legislation. Google is only using headlines and tiny snippets. They aren't copying articles. They aren't doing any harm to investigative journalism. All they do is point people at what they were searching for. It's not their responsibility to help the newspapers if the newspapers are having trouble. Google's already linking to them.
There is quite a bit of hypocrisy in demanding access to the product of a large number of individuals and corporations in an automated way while denying others access to the derivative of those products.
> http http://www.google.com/robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /searchI have no special feelings for google, but making a law that requires search engine providers to strike a separate contract with any publishing entity whose contents they want to list would hardly be beneficial to any side. It's just that most german publishing houses are too blind to see. They're like a wounded elephant in a porcelain store: Unable to clearly see what damage they're causing to the surrounding world.
And rightly so. Google controls the way people surf the web, as a monopolist they will be hit with regulation like this more frequently. The homepage of those newspapers used to be the main avenue to get to the content rather than search.
Please note that I'm against such legislation, I just feel that Google is operating on a principle of asymmetry and uses its monopoly position to control an ever larger amount of the content on the web and access to that content without wanting to reciprocate by releasing their own content in a similar manner. Until they do I think they don't deserve our pity or support.
It's all take and very little give. I can't fault them for doing that as long as they can get away with it but they really don't deserve to harness public opinion against the legislators that attempt to reduce the strength of the monopoly position.
Wrong: Google (or Bing or Duckduckgo) is not making money off their content. Google is making money off the index they compile, of the service they offer above and beyond what the publishing houses offer. Nobody wants to go to each newspaper page and see what they write about a specific topic. Now, the publishing houses could agree and build their own index, shut google out and be done with it. They'd even have a much better starting point to do so since they have vastly more information about the content they server. But they don't. Quite to the contrary, they try to shut down services that provide such a service (Perlentaucher springs to my mind here).
It's not about pity and support for google either. There is a monopoly on the other side as well: Most publishing houses are pro this legislation, so you read very little against the proposed law in major publications. It's good that a corporate player now takes up the flag to counterbalance for that - even if it's google.
The proposed law is poorly worded and poorly targeted, it will endanger bloggers who cite from newspaper publications, even linking the headline on facebook may open you up to a lawsuit. It would practically require all bloggers to go back through their blogs and strike all mention of newspaper articles from past articles. So even if I could somehow accept that the publishing houses should be awarded some of googles earnings - in this case I'd have to join their flag. But if you can't rally behind a good cause just because "google deserves a slap on it head", then rally behind IGEL [1] which is the (bloggers) initiative against the proposed law.
For me this law is there to protect printed newspapers from the evil internet thing (including small web-only publishers and bloggers). That it's supported by all big german media and publishing houses isn't a coincidence. But in the end it won't help them, since from my point of view the print crisis in Germany is to no small also caused by poor journalism and an unability to create new revenue streams as it is by the "internet" per se.
A further risk, and you can actually call me a little bit of a tin foil hat if you want, you ahve a nice little law in place that can actually be used to suppres inconvinient information. Add all the other laws already in place that are used to hunt movie pirates and file sharers and the Stasi or Gestapo would have cut their right arm of to have equal opportunities to isurvaill and influence the public.
And the forth power in a democracry, the press, is actually promoting things like that just because they are to lacy and stupid to protect their bottom line in a different way.
Do I mean to support Google? No, because Google can also be pretty harsh when profits are concerned but for now Google is the lesser evil. Maybe in 10 years from now there wil be initiatives targeting Google inspired legislations who nows. But right now, the leistungsschutzrecht is like burning down the house in order to prevent from being maybe flooded some day. And not liking the guy who want's to do something about it isn't, IMHO, a good reason to just stand by and watch it happen.
Some publishers now want to redefine these standards which helped everyone. If the published standards of the internet didn't suit some publishers, they didn't have to be on it. Eat the cake, and have it too?
I don't see any reason for Google to hand over their hard work for free; they are playing by the rules.
Who said it had to be free? How about sharing revenues? I'm pretty sure that would go a long way towards making a win-win situation. Of course google isn't used to having to pay for its content but that doesn't mean they should not have to. If you displace someones homepage but still use their content then you've entered into a parasitic relationship that will last until the subject dies.
That leaves only losers so the German position is not as unreasonable as you make it out to be.
Maybe those newspapers deserve to die, maybe their time has simply come. Legislation like this is usually only putting off the inevitable and I'm really not in favor. But google crying 'unfair!' is a bit much.
(2) because we need a free press, which is a greater good than the income of some corporation
The press has a function that is a cornerstone of modern societies, if the press collectively goes bust we have a serious problem.
It should come as a noteworthy thing that the government (an opposing party here) should need to protect the press. You could easily argue that it is to the governments advantage not to have a free press at all. And yet, they value it enough that they propose (misguided) legislation to protect it.
This case is a prime example of big-corporate lobbyism and not at all about free press.
The system certainly has its flaws and room for improvement, but a purely privately owned system is not a better option.
It wouldn't be any problem at all for the publishers to hide their webpages behind a paywall and then charge for access. They could even try and negotiate a price with google. Now, wether that's a good strategy is a question in itself, but they don't do that. They rather want a "search engine tax" imposed by the state.
Google is only interested in what makes money for Google, and it has lost any credibility when it comes to looking out for the public's interest (or "do no evil" in general) a long time ago.
Their campaign should be called "Defend our profit margins", Google is no better than the publishers pushing in favor of this legislation, their interest just accidentally happen to coincide with ours.
So is your argument that it's not in the public's best interest to oppose this legislation, thus why they shouldn't use the slogan "Defend Your Net"?
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
http://www.news.com.au/top-stories/greens-and-coalition-dump...
GET /news.html HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
GET /news.html HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
HTTP/1.1 403 ForbiddenI'm looking forward to see in a years time what the result of this little experiment is.
...it's silly, but this is what happens when publishers don't understand the Internet.
the petition is currently pending but it seems they didnt reach enough people.