"But the one thing I find really dangerous is that they (meaning major newspapers, politicians, etc.) managed to spin the story so that the narrative is now "greedy google" vs hard working journalists."
Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past -- research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals overseas.
What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of abstracts) may also be unfair.
I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good articles would have likely declined.
Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.
I think the problem here is that this goes against the basic premise of the web itself and hypermedia. What about my blog where I post the (in my opinion) most important news of the day and link to the sources. Okay, those links are manually curated. What if I write a script that automatically posts (tweets?) all the articles I visit. Ok I am not a search engine but where do you draw the line? My point is that this is very hard to define and write down as a law.
Is a discussion necessary? Absolutely. Do we need a strong press? You bet your ass we do. Do we perhaps need to restructure the current model and fund the fourth power? Yeah, I dont know. Is this the way? Certainly not.
But I think this is only another symptom of a trend currently manifestating where people with ties and no insight into the matter try to control and profit from a medium they are just beginning to understand. The ITU conference, this guy in the UK who wanted to sue everyoneone retweeting an article,....
the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?
I don't understand the distinction you are making between these two situations.
Think about the larger precedent that you're setting here, however. Should I not be able to quote a few lines and link you to a news story without paying money to the source I'm linking to? (whether the license was compulsory or not). What is google news but a factual stating of "here's what a bunch of sources said about the news today"? If a major event happens in your home town, how much money will it cost you to put up a blog post saying, "here's a roundup of coverage on this event"?
Just for the record, French laws about "droits d'auteurs" and quotations allow you to quote any text under "droits d'auteur" as long as it remains a quotation (the definition of which is vague, and varies from one case of "jurisprudence" to another, but 300 words is generally considered reasonable)
This sortof is an essential preamble to free speech. Now, i agree with you, there's "quote" and there's "quote".
[C]ontent of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized.
I don't buy the assertion of inherent value. There's a ton of crap out there.
If there's any value in content it's subjective, not inherent.
People who are so convinced of the value of their content are free to erect a paywall and rake in the cash.
But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google?
It' perhaps something to consider, but it has to be a consensual act, where the value is negotiated. Google may already be providing commensurate value by driving traffic to a site.
Google's value is in its comprehensiveness. Both the marginal value and cost to maintain a single piece of content in their index is extremely close to zero.
> If it had zero value why would Google be interested in it?
Again, value is subjective. Even if you think it has zero value, even if every engineer at Google thinks it has zero value, it might have value to someone out there. If nothing else, it could be a part of a corpus linguistics study.
> I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6.
Newspapers and newsmagazines have always been very mercenary/cavalier about this sort of thing. Especially pre-web but even today, newspapers routinely rewrite stories from competing papers without even the slightest mention of where they got that information, radio shows discuss today's print headlines and read excerpts, readers' digests (e.g. The Week) pay no license fees for the stories they summarize and it's an old lament in newsrooms that local TV news just copies whatever's in the paper that day.
By comparison, an aggregator that pulls headlines from news sites and links them back to the original content seems rather innocuous.
(Of course, I don't intend to argue that because journalists steal, aggregators shouldn't feel bad about stealing either. But it puts things into perspective. And if headlines and links aren't fair use I don't know what is.)
Isn't there a certain degree of truth in this? Truly, there is a big problem if the rates for borrowing content is too high. But I think what the German public is responding to is how journalism has changed and not in ways that are necessarily positive. There is far less incentive to be a good journalist now since the quality of a given article is likely much lower than in the past -- research is more limited, articles are written in a greater hurry, even some articles these days are largely written by computer or by individuals overseas.
What this law is reasonably trying to address is that content of whatever form -- be it newspaper articles, images, whatever -- has inherent value that should be recognized. Surely enforcing that value with an iron fist like the RIAA is not the right way to go. But allowing free expropriation (even of abstracts) may also be unfair.
I think a good analogy, fifty years ago, would be a newspaper that sends out people to read other newspapers very early in the morning (say at 5 AM) and then produces its own newspaper at 6. Surely such a thing would not have been possible fifty years ago, but something similar is possible today with the advent of the internet. If this behavior had occurred fifty years ago and hadn't been regulated, imagine what would have happened: the overall quality of newspapers would have been diluted and the incentive to produce good articles would have likely declined.
Now, of course, this isn't quite perfect. Again, Google is borrowing very small snippets. And surely -- if anyone remembers this -- the French courts were wrong several years ago when they allowed some newspapers to sue Google for simply posting a few sentences or a link to an article. But what if newspapers could charge a modest fee commensurate to the value an article link is to Google? Over time, the fees could certainly accrue. The question, I think, is how high these fees are and how this sort of regulation is imposed.