Has the German government’s Leistungsschutzrecht just protected the Internet by mistake?

Ed Paton-Williams reports on Germany’s new copyright law and how it might have accidentally done the Internet more good than harm.

Image: CC-BY-NC-SA Flickr: dalbera

German newspapers have been lobbying for a change to German copyright law for several years. They think that search engines and news aggregators like Google News threaten their businesses by reproducing their content without permission. Google News shows its users links to newspaper articles, a 240 character snippet of those articles.

Google argues that they’re increasing the amount of people who visit newspapers’ websites and see the adverts on those sites. Google doesn’t sell any adverts for its Google News pages. German newspaper groups, including Axel Springer - a News International-style corporation - think that Google and others should pay a licence fee if they want to put links and snippets of articles on sites like Google News.

Germany’s coalition government of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Liberals proposed in their 2009 coalition agreement to pass a law to “improve the protection of press products on the Internet.” They then introduced a Bill in November 2012 (often referred to as Leistungsschutzrecht or ancillary copyright) saying that websites would have to pay for a licence if they wanted to show links to or snippets of publishers’ copyrighted content just like the newspaper groups had asked for.

Internet advocacy groups like Digitale Gesellschaft ran campaigns against the Bill as did Google with its Defend Your Net campaign and Wikimedia Deutschland. Despite those campaigns and the opposition of the Social Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party, the German Parliament passed the Bill this morning. Victory for the newspaper publishers then. Actually, no.

There had been last-minute changes to the Bill which actually allowed websites to show short snippets of copyright text without paying a licence fee. Websites that want to use longer extracts or an entire article will still have to pay a fee. The Bill has done a complete about-turn and the German Parliament has in fact legislated to protect Google News’ model.

The easiest conclusion to draw is that the German government just hasn’t realised what it’s done. It’s legislated to allow Google and others to continue what they’re doing anyway. Even though their instincts seem to be to ensure that newspapers can continue with their current outdated business models, the German government has passed a law which may well ensure that newspapers have to change the way they make money.

Whether that’s what the German government intended or not, we should hope that the newspaper publishers dedicate their efforts to developing a business model that doesn’t rely on Governments passing laws that cripple the internet. Getting people to pay for the privilege of increasing another site’s traffic and advertising revenue just doesn’t make any sense and it discourages innovation. The newspapers should concentrate on doing some innovation themselves and work out how they can use the Internet to make money without charging those who want to link to their articles.

If the German newspaper industry wants to carry on pushing for licences for links and snippets then they’ll come up against dedicated opposition from Digitale Gesellschaft, Wikimedia and others again and again.

Ed Paton-Williams is a Campaigns Intern at Open Rights Group. He's interested in technology, politics  and studied German at  university which makes this pretty much the best possible topic for him. He blogs on British politics, gender and the politics of technology at edpw.wordpress.com