Germany’s government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material.
Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.“The term of protection should be one year,” according to the committee.This could bring Germany in to line with the UK, where the Newspaper Licensing Agency (originally formed to charge royalties on photocopies of news clippings that are used commercially) now requires commercial news aggregators and their customers each pay a license to, respectively, process and receive summaries of newspapers’ online articles.
“Commercial traders out there such as search engines and news aggregators should pay a fee to the publishers in the future for the distribution of press products (such as newspaper articles) on the internet.”
As in the UK, Germany is proposing “normal” private re-users of web news article summaries be exempt from royalties. But, whilst the UK mechanism avoids charging Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News because it targets only pay-for news aggregators, Germany’s proposal mentions both search engines and news aggregators.
The debate over whether search engines should pay for the privilege of crawling and using excerpts has been a long-running one that Google has sought to contain on multiple fronts…
Belgian newspapers won a European court case forcing Google to stop excerpting stories, demanding a phenomenal €49 million in damages. They even sued the European Commission for the same thing.
Since then, Germany’s publishing industry has been lobbying lawmakers for action, too…
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-germany-wants-to-charge-search-engines-to-use-news-excerpts
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