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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

> I don't see how Google gets away with the second point for non-CC'd material.

This is how I've been told it went by in Germany: there was a law drafted[1] that said publishers should get compensation for snippets of their articles in search results. This was a law apparently drafted directly in response to Google's practices.

So Google sent a letter to most publishers, asking for royalty-free access to their content, or otherwise they would not show up anymore on Google's services. All publishers agreed to sign that, because being removed from Google means losing a decent amount of your ad income.

That's how they get away with it.

[1] https://gigaom.com/2013/03/01/german-parliament-passes-googl...

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The law was passed, not only drafted! But it was pointless:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/23/kapitulation/

The German government made themselves look like fools. They were easily manipulated by a literal handful of newspaper magnates (primarily the boss of Axel Springer) whose positions were nonsensical - they were complaining about being in Google News without compensation, but didn't use robots.txt to take themselves out of it. Surely that would have been the start of any normal business negotiation? Why would any change to the law have been needed at all?

So after wasting vast amounts of time in changing the law, the German government learned a hopefully important lesson - they were being used as pawns in a game to try and extract free money from a foreign company and the actual complaints were meritless. A tiny amount of technical literacy would have gone a long way.

This law makes me angry. How could have anybody been so stupid? Did the publishers really think Google would just hand them over money? Google announced even before it passed that they'd drop the content. They underestimated what power Google has and if they drop you from the index then you lose not them.

Now they are all handing over royalty-free access to Google. But all other companies and people still have to pay. I mean the publishers think they can make at least a bit of money that way. But they again don't seem to realise that this only strengthens Google because all (potential) competitors have to pay...

The Google folks must be really celebrating over this. A law specifically designed to target Google has only strengthened them.

> How could have anybody been so stupid?

We are talking about the people publishing "Bild", here. It's not actually about being stupid, it's about being blinded by their own evilness.

Would you expect anything different from, say, Murdoch?

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