France may tax Google for republishing headlines, President Hollande warns
Found on Computerworld UK on Tuesday, 30 October 2012
France may introduce a law to make Google pay to republish news snippets if it doesn't strike a deal with French news publishers before the end of the year, the office of French President François Hollande said.
In August, the German cabinet backed a proposal to extend copyright protection to news article snippets republished by search engines. If the law comes into force, publishers could be allowed to charge Google and other search engines for republishing parts of their articles.
There's a rather simple and obvious solution to all this: if newspapers don't want Google to use snippets to link to them, Google can just stop linking to them. It's pretty much similar to any product: if you don't like the price, you don't buy it. Google has no legal requirement to include everybody in its search results. Actually they can already use the robots.txt to stop Google from using their content; but that's not what they want: they want Google to send over visitors and pay for that. It just doesn't work that way.