German parliament to discuss controversial online copyright bill
Found on Computerworld on Friday, 30 November 2012
The German parliament is set to discuss a controversial online copyright bill that is meant to allow news publishers to charge search engines such as Google for reproducing short snippets from their articles.
The draft law proposes that publishers could charge a search engine for republishing snippets of articles, or eventually allow them to sue search engines like Google for copyright infringement.
The search engine "obviously" tries to use its own users for lobbying interests "under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet", wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling, politicians of the CDU and CSU conservative parties.
As if the BDZV wasn't lobbying heavily to have clueless politicians work on such a law. However, it might be a valueable lesson if this law comes into effect: if I would be a search engine (like Google, Bing or Yahoo) I would contact the news publishers and ask them if they want to sell those snippets or continue to offer them for free. In case of the first, I'd simply make the free decision to reject the sale and drop all their content to avoid legal issues.