Net Neutrality? Google Prods Users to Fight Copyright Law.(Spiegel).By Sven Becker and Marcel Rosenbach. Google is increasingly throwing around its power to improve its bottom line. The latest incident is a draft law in Germany that would force the company to share some revenues with newspaper publishers. Meddling in politics is certainly not illegal, but it could be risky.
At its core, the proposal concerns the headlines and short teaser texts indexed by search engines -- the so-called snippets.
The bill aims to protect copyrights that belong to newspapers and their publishers. When search engines display those snippets "for commercial purposes," the proposed law would allow the publishing houses to charge a fee. Bloggers, clubs, associations and even company press reviews would not be affected by the current draft version of the law.
Until last week, this somewhat arcane issue in copyright law caused little more than a ripple in the public consciousness.
But all that changed on Tuesday. That's when Google declared the skirmish over the info snippet as a major battleground in the big war -- namely the fight for freedom on the Web. Consequently, the roughly 15.6 million users who bombard Google Germany with search queries every day were presented with a link under the usual search mask that led them directly to a campaign website -- where the search engine giant called for resistance: "Defend Your Net." According to Google, the law would "make it significantly more difficult to find the information you are searching for on the Internet." Read the full story here.
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