The German parliament has passed a controversial law that will force search engines and news aggregators to pay publishers royalties for providing short snippets of their articles in results.
The Bundestag passed the Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger (LSR), or “ancillary copyright for press publishers” law, on Friday by 293 votes to 243. Germany’s coalition government was the driver behind the law, and the main opposition, the SPD, now says it will try to defeat the law in the country’s second legislative chamber, the Bundesrat.
The text that got passed in the Bundestag exempts “small text snippets”, although it does not state how short a text snippet has to be to be royalty-free – if it is less than headline-short, this will probably mean the wholesale removal of all German news publications from Google’s search results.
Google has been a vocal opponent of the law, for obvious reasons. In France and Belgium the company has settled related disputes with publishers in deals that many have seen as tantamount to a payoff. However, it looks like the German situation is now beyond settlement.
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