Berlin Court May Upend German Copyright Law
Found on Handelsblatt on Friday, 12 May 2017
German publishers, including Handelsblatt Publishing, the owner of Handelsblatt Global, want Google and other search engines to reimburse them for summarizing snippets of their news content in web searches.
The case was brought before the Berlin court after VG Media, an association of privately owned publishers and broadcasters including Handelsblatt and Axel Springer, publisher of Bild newspaper, sued Google.
Why go to court at all? VG wants money for short snippets with links; remove those snippets and the links from the index to solve the problem. Later, when VG complains about the lack of traffic, offer them to include them in the index for a fee.