German Bill Limits Search Engines’ Free Access to News

The bill, which follows years of debate, came as the newspaper industry in Germany, as elsewhere, struggles to find new sources of revenue as readers and advertisers move online in droves.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition, which faces an election in September, watered down its original plans amid pressure from Internet lobbyists, lawyers and others who argued that it undermined freedom of information. The opposition parties could still block the bill in the Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, where the government has no majority.

Google began an ad campaign in German newspapers and set up a Web site called “Defend your Web” to lobby against the proposals, saying they would result in less information for consumers and higher costs for companies.

The “ancillary copyright” bill now makes clear that search engines can publish “individual words or small snippets of text such as headlines” without incurring any costs.

They would have to pay for use of longer pieces of content, though opposition parties said the wording of the bill was vague and could lead to courts having to rule on individual cases.

“It is not at all clear who is now meant to be protected from whom and why there is this law,” said the opposition Greens on their Web site on Friday, saying the bill served neither cash-hungry publishers nor the free flow of information.

Google echoed such criticism.

“The law is neither necessary nor sensible. It hampers innovation and hurts the economy and Internet users in Germany,” said Kay Oberbeck, communications director at Google.

But the association of German newspaper publishers welcomed the bill as “an important element in the creation of a fair legal space in the digital world.”

They have argued that search engines raise the vast majority of their revenue from online advertising and that a substantial part of this come directly or indirectly from the free access to professional news or entertainment content produced by news media companies.

The German draft bill states explicitly that it is not intended to protect newspapers from the effects of ongoing structural changes in the market.

German Copyright Law Takes Aim at Google Links

As originally proposed by the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel last year, the law was seen as a clear attempt by a European government to force big Internet companies like Google to share some of the billions of euros they earn from the sale of advertising placed alongside the news that Google links to.

But a last-minute change, proposed last week by the Free Democratic Party, the junior partner in Ms. Merkel’s government, allowed for the use of “individual words or the smallest excerpts of text” free, meaning that only those companies who reproduce full texts for commercial use will be required to compensate the news publishers.

The weakened bill passed Germany’s lower house, the Bundestag, 293 to 243. But it will require approval by Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat, which is controlled by the Social Democrats and the Greens, in the opposition, which have sought to have the bill scrapped altogether.

“No one except for a few big publishers wants this law,” said Tabea Rössner, a member of the Greens and a media expert, in the debate before the vote on Friday. “Certainly no one in the online world.”

Google welcomed the fact that only a weakened version had passed but made clear its opposition to any form of legislation.

The company had bitterly opposed the original proposal and waged a campaign called “Defend Your Net,” both online and through full-page ads in the same publications that would profit from the proposed law, known as an ancillary copyright law because it extends copyright to new areas.

Google argued that the law would impinge on the free flow of information and innovation online.

“As a result of today’s vote, ancillary copyright in its most damaging form has been stopped,” said Ralf Bremer, a spokesman for Google in Germany, who argued that the law was “not necessary because publishers and Internet companies can innovate together, just as Google has done in many other countries.”

Google does not sell advertising on its German news aggregation service, which displays snippets of articles and links to the originating sites. But the company earns billions of euros from advertising on its search engine and other services.

Most German newspaper publishers, on the other hand, generate only minuscule revenue online from advertising or other sources, like so-called pay walls around their content.

Consequently, they welcomed the law, even in its weakened form, as an instrument that would allow them to determine the conditions under which material produced by their journalists and writers could be used by search engines and other third-party aggregators that reproduce their material online.

“With the ancillary copyright law, publishing houses now have a right that other intermediaries have long had,” the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers said.

Members of the European Publishers Council, a lobbying group in Brussels that has been pushing for a fundamental change in the relationship between publishers and Google, also hailed the law as an important step toward recognizing “clearly in copyright law both the value and the cost of investment in professional journalistic content.”

“The E.P.C. believes that this law will help establish a market for aggregator content,” said Angela Mills Wade, the council’s executive director. “New innovative business models can now be built based on legally licensed content.”

But critics contend that a watering-down law not only fails to grant full legal clarity to either of the two sides but also opens the door to long legal disputes over the exact definition of a snippet and how much text can be legally reproduced by the search engines without incurring charges.

“The Bundestag passed a law today that will make neither the publishers, nor the critics nor the general public happy,” the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote in an opinion piece. “Who is helped by a law that does not have any winners, only both sides somehow lose?”