Several of Germany's largest newspaper and magazine publishers have instituted legal proceedings against Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. They're seeking an order that would make the search engines pay them an 11 percent portion of their "gross sales, including foreign sales" that come "directly and indirectly from making excerpts from online newspapers and magazines public". That's according to new media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who published a blog post Friday morning calling the demands "as absurd as they are cynical and dangerous" and part of a German "war on the link". The move appears to be an attempt to achieve in courts what the publishers were not able to get last year through the German legislative process.
The German companies that instigated the arbitration against Google include Axel Springer, Burda, WAZ, the Muncher Merkur. Other major publishers have chosen not to participate, including Spiegel Online, Handelsblatt, Sueddeutsche.de, Stern.de and Focus.
Germany in particular has been historically resistant to some of Google's products. The country wouldn't allow Street View to be rolled out without a strong opt-out program, which caused more than 240,000 German addresses to be pixelated.
The demand comes at a time when Google just doesn't seem to be popular with European judges and regulators. Last month, the European Court of Justice said that European Union residents have a "right to be forgotten" and can request links related to them to be removed from search engines.
To be honest, this doesn't look like an EU thing to me, but more like a German media problem. No other nation seems to be getting involved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:02AM
Why can't these obsolete fatcats just enjoy structural unemployment like the rest of us?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by davester666 on Tuesday June 24 2014, @03:18AM
I believe the solution to this problem is mentioned in the summary "the right to be forgotten". Google removes the links to the sites which want google to pay for the links, and those sites will quickly be forgotten.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday June 24 2014, @04:37AM
Spoken like a free loading hippy. Free from the all the links and snippets of their award winning and high integrity articles being stolen and put onto the net, the publishers will thrive and enjoy the revenues of days past.
Through word of mouth, and careful online marketing devoid of any samples, but viral marketing buzzwords and appeal to emotion, millions of Germans will flock to the public streets to purchase a real magazine they can hold in their hands. Sure, it may cost a significant fraction of their monthly ISP cost, but it will be worth it to pick it up and shake out of all the prepaid postage cards to receive even more *real* content sent to them. Being able to scratch and sniff the perfume is more or less priceless and cannot be understood in terms of money and value. The approximate half of the magazine being directly and superficially devoted to paid advertisements that have nothing to do with the fine impartial articles, is accepted and welcomed by the readership.
If *only* Google would stop, the publishers, the poor victims, would easily see all that revenue coming back to them.
It's not like a technology exists to connect German readers with free news, and any number of foreign publishers of content. That would require an interconnected series of computers or something. An Internet if you will.....
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:16AM
You mean like this? [searchengineland.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:56AM
and how many will follow suit?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @03:13AM
(Score: 2) by redneckmother on Tuesday June 24 2014, @03:41AM
Hey! That's so wrong!
I want 11 cents every time I read the word "word", in any freaking language!
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @12:31PM
I'm content with getting just one cent -- every time I read a word. Any word. :-)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday June 24 2014, @09:35PM
Between reading Soylent and /. comments, I'd be a millionaire in an afternoon.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kstox on Tuesday June 24 2014, @05:08AM
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all obey robots.txt. Is it really that difficult?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:47AM
How are they supposed to make money-for-nothing (or, in fact, money for free advertising) from doing that?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:24AM
Not entirely true. Here in Denmark we already have the rules that they want in Germany.
As a result, Denmark does not even exist in the dropdown on Google News.
I'm not quite sure the German newspapers know what they are asking for.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:25AM
I guess no one remembers Belgium newspapers tried something similar [informationweek.com] a few years ago and got what they asked for [searchengineland.com] but then they cried foul. Eventually they all
made up [techdirt.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @07:57AM
The sad thing is that it actually matters that much whether Google lists a company in its search engine. It means that Google has a power that no corporation should have. No, that's not about Google being evil (just having the power does not make you evil, abusing it does), but it's about things going wrong in the economy as a whole.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday June 24 2014, @08:41AM
Oh climb down off of that soap box.
Clearly you were not around pre-alta-vista, the search engine that started it all.
Without search engines, it was almost impossible to find ANY news from other countries that your local newspaper didn't happen to carry, unless you wanted to go to the library an read two week old the once-a-week newspaper from some country close to the country you were actually interested in, (because your library couldn't afford all of the papers).
The situation didn't really improve just because the internet sprung up. News paper web sites told you how to subscribe. That's about it. Only the advent of search engines gave small papers global reach, and they make as much money letting google index them as the did previously selling an occasional over-seas subscription.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:44PM
I was around in the day, and I was subscribed to the mailing list of a group of people that typed the news off the radio (a continent away). Then with the www, media started putting up web sites that you could navigate to directly. The rudimentary search engines were useful for finding the sites initially, but you couldn't have counted on specific content being reachable through the search engine.
But the economics are different now, at least in the US, the new media business model seems to lead formerly serious news outlets to use double-entendre headlines and kitten stories to farm for links on facebook.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 24 2014, @06:24PM
Web Spider existed before Alta Vista, and Yahoo got its start trying to manually index the web. (It was a lot smaller then.)
And *I* agree with the grand parent. Such centralization of power is a danger.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @08:03PM
because this has nothing to do with EU being reluctant to accept google's practices. this is just big publishers trolling for money, again.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Geezer on Tuesday June 24 2014, @11:26AM
The rest of the world can get along very nicely without search engines' featuring content from butt-hurt German publishers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 24 2014, @12:23PM
"To be honest, this doesn't look like an EU thing to me, but more like a German media problem. No other nation seems to be getting involved."
then why sneak the EU thing into the article in the first place?
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:03PM
The reference to the EU originated in the quoted article (the indented portion) - SN does not censor or edit quotes. We do not include the whole of the article but those parts that we do quote are unchanged from the original and are as we received them. It's a combination of freedom of speech and not putting words into someone else's mouth.
My comment as the submitter of this article, hence it is under the same indentation of 'janrinok writes:' is just that - my comment. I haven't noticed any international support for this German move, although I note others have now commented with information to suggest that the Germans are not the first to try this.
Just to finish and explain the SN position - the submitter and the editor cannot, except in exceptional circumstances, be one and the same person. This is to prevent any abuse of the system. When the submission queue drops to a critical level, which is not an unknown occurrence, then part of the editorial team have to go looking for new stories. The other editors carry on with the normal editorial tasks and release the stories.
(Score: 2) by RaffArundel on Tuesday June 24 2014, @03:53PM
Thanks for the insight on the editorial policy.
For the record and benefit of others reading this thread, the EU is mentioned twice in the article - the recent decision on the "right to be forgotten" and the Belgium "take me off, no put me back!" because both went counter to Google. So, Ars tied it to the EU, not some commentary from the submitter. I don't see in TFA what court they filed in, but it does say "arbitration" which could mean at any number of levels.
As others have stated, I'd just cut 'em off and give them the "right to be forgotten". But then I get most of my EU news from the BBC (for good or ill) or Reuters (again... for good or ill) and have probably never seen a German publication since I lived there.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Fry on Tuesday June 24 2014, @02:21PM
So, publishers don't want to be part of Google News (unless they get paid) because they claim GN costs them money (ad revenue or subscription fees, I suppose), but they want to be part of Google's regular search because that makes them money (through extra traffic), but they don't pay Google anything for this service that makes money for publishers.
Yeah, no double standard there...