Ancillary copyright (Leistungsschutzrecht) for publishers Against innovation
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Tags: CDU, coalition, freedom of expression, Google, ancillary copyright, news aggregator, news publisher, press, Rivva, search engine
So there it is, the ancillary copyright. A done deal, search engines are to pay publishers license fees. An unprecedented fight against networking is imminent.
While the first draft still stated that eben bloggers should pay, this is now off the table – but innovation in the online sector will nevertheless be destroyed. Details are available in this episode of “Elektrischer Reporter” CC BY NC SA.
The battle of the networks
How you can go against your own users in this way is beyond me. News aggregators such as Rivva are one of the most important pillars of the internet – central signposts to noteworthy content. But instead of making it as easy as possible for your readers to find your content, you would rather conduct lengthy license negotiations.
What do you hope to achieve by this, dear publishers? Even Google does not have money to give away, quite apart from the fact that indexing brings you tangible benefits. The result will be lengthy license negotiations, during which your content will not be findable – if Google even gets involved at all. The losers: services that do not have the money for such negotiations, like Rivva, Commentarist or Quote.fm. The winners: publishers who do not play along in this game can look forward to a big piece of the online cake.
Or is it about control? About people quoting snippets of text on social networks like Twitter and giving you nothing in return but a link? That link is an expression of genuine appreciation, the equivalent of praise, a recommendation (even if the content is criticized – it is noteworthy) – something of immense value. And your readers will not let themselves be controlled, will not surf directly to you if they do not find you in the index. Those who appreciate your offers will continue to read your posts and will not notice your law (you do not like reporting on it either). The others will simply ignore you.
And goodbye, index.
Another small code snippet for people who would like to keep search engines out:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Create a new text file, copy the code from above into it, save it as “robots.txt” and put it on the server. Done. But if all goes well, then the search engines and news aggregators will do it for you by themselves.