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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| Image Source: thetechblock.com |
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.
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