Germany Ponders New Copyright for News

There's a new intellectual property right being considered by the German legislature.  While precise language is still being developed, proponents have talked about new type of copyright as indicating that the use of any published content online, no matter how small the snippet, would require payments to publishers, at least if the use was commercial or generated value associated with the use.  One scenario discussed was online news aggregators who have advertising on their site.  Another would seem to extend to any use where someone along the line obtained some value.

"The example that was given at the hearing was: a bank employee reads his morning newspaper online and sees something about the steel industry, and then advises his clients to invest in certain markets," Mathias Schindler, who helped found Wikimedia Deutschland, told Al Jazeera.
"The publishers argued that the bank consultant was only able to advise his clients because of the journalistic work in the published article," said Schindler, who's been attending recent government hearings into the proposed copyright amendments. "So that means the publisher deserves a fair share of any money made from that scenario. This was the proposal from the start."

The Federation of German Newspaper Publishers understandably applauded the idea -

"In the digital age, such a right is essential to protect the joint efforts of journalists and publishers," it said in a statement, noting that such revenues were "an essential measure for the maintenance of an independent, privately financed news media."

Like other recent proposals to find new revenue streams for traditional media, this is a proposal that looks good at first (at least to the rights holders).  However, if you start considering the downstream implications of the proposal a lot of problems emerge. A researcher at the Bureau for Information Law Expertise in Germany argued that this kind of copyright expansion being pushed by publishers was likely to lead to significant "collateral damage to fundamental freedoms like the freedom of the press, the freedom of expression, the freedom of science and education as well as the communication and publication practices on the Web."  At the very least, it revokes any kind of fair use/fair dealing principle.

  Another problem mentioned by critics is the inherent difficulty in determining and tracking whether information going through multiple intermediaries leads to some eventual commercial value that would trigger the licensing payments, or (using the above example) determining which specific publisher was the source of the information whose consequent use created commercial value.  And following that logic a bit further, if reading a local German newspaper online would be more costly (because of the licensing fees), wouldn't the online user go to a non-local news source in a country that didn't have this enhanced copyright?  Would information sites and sources flee German jurisdiction to avoid the costs and enforcement requirements of such an extension of copyright?  And then there's the enforcement issues related to dealing with all the small blogs, social media, emails, and other digital sources that might post a snippet of news - particularly those located outside Germany.  Turning the simple idea of creators of news and information sharing in any rewards from other people's use of that information into a viable and functional system for identifying, determining the values and appropriate "share," tracking, collecting, and distributing licensing fees equitably could easily become a operational nightmare, if not outright disaster.

  But the real problem will turn out to be that such moves aren't really likely to generate much added revenue in the first place.  Newspaper publishers think: sure, I get paid for people's use of my online content - that's great.  But they tend to forget that newspapers are news aggregators themselves - studies show that only 5-10% of a newspaper's news content is produced entirely in-house (where they would be the sole owner of copyright).  So if these kind of copyright extensions are enacted, the newspapers might well be receiving licensing fees for 10% of their content, but would be required to pay licensing fees for the remaining 90% of their total output.  On average, and in the long run, these new licensing schemes are likely to cost news organizations dearly, rather than be their salvation.

Source -  Germany Wants To Charge Google For News Snippets,  Information Week