German copyright law takes aim at Google links

The ancillary copyright bill was approved by Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, on March 1, granting publishers the right to charge companies for reproducing their online content. However, search engines like Google, Bing, MySearchResults, and Yahoo! are still allowed to display snippets or small excerpts from publishers’ websites for free. However, what defines a ‘snippet’ or a ‘small excerpt’ is a bit of a grey area in the copyright law.

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In its original form, the ancillary bill had Google carping. Google would bear the brunt had the bill been passed in its damaging form – requiring news aggregators and search engines to pay royalties for the commercial use of snippets or excerpts of their content. Oppositions said that the original proposal would force Internet giants like Google into a profit-sharing scheme that’s encroaching the free flow of information and innovation online.

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Other activists saw the original proposal as an offshoot of lobbying against the glaring sales disparity between Google and German press publishers. Apparently, Google earns billions of euros from its advertising and online services without having to sell advertising campaigns on its news aggregation service in Germany while the news publishers are earning a measly amount from their online advertisements.

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These congruent validations made up the rationalization to repurpose the ancillary bill. A last-minute change on the copyright law by the Free Democratic Party required only the companies reproducing the whole content to compensate the publishers.

The Bundesrat is yet to decide on the ancillary copyright bill.

MySearchResults handles aggregate data from major search engines. Try it at MySearchResults.com.

To Caesar what’s Caesar: Sounding the alarm for attributing aggregated content

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Who’s policing the Internet?

At least against indiscriminate acts such as aggregating content sans proper attribution. To clarify, no such thing as an anti-aggregation campaign exists, but a curator’s code must. Aggregation and curation are now the buzzwords of a booming enterprise: crafting stories, ideas, or subjects on Web 2.0. Both almost synonymous, either is the version of syndication for mostly blogging, including micro, and article manufacture. The Huffington Post (HuffPost), AllTops, and Esquire are all aggregators in a sense.

And then there are those who have risen to the call.


 
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Last year, Mr. Simon Dumenco’s double-hit, Advertising Age article on two Twitter trending topics was hunted down by a couple of traffic-seekers. The writer, however, observed that as the bigger game player, HuffPost was pinging back less traffic than its smaller counterpart, Techmeme. This incited Dumenco to espouse the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation.




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Soon, the effort caught on with the big guns: the editors-in-chief of Esquire, The Atlantic, and New York magazine were linking arms with the editors-in-chief of Slate, The New York Observer, and Longreads.com, the committee members. A panel meeting occurred in Austin, Texas. Aggregation, linking, and summarizing must be congruent with best practices put in black-and-white, they said. With this set in motion, similar efforts are expected to arise. This is not tantamount to seeking justice, but only to ending the disparities between misappropriated behaviors and the essence of consumer Internet. If it’s the parties involved policing their way to untangling the Web, so be it.  


MySearchResults self-regulates when it comes to aggregating content from the search giants to its portal. For specialized answers to your online queries, check out its site.