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Deutsch: Google droht der französischen Online-Presse mit Ausschluss aus der G...

GESTE, a French group of online editors, has been trying for a few years now to get part of Google’s revenues generated by its news service with indexed titles.

"Google has developed on our content” said Corinne Denis, President of GESTE who also stated for Édition Multimédi@: “We have been discussing with them for years on this topic. And if they have kept their promise to never sell advertising on Google News, by including the news on their search engine, they have cleverly avoided the obstacle”.

Therefore GESTE supports a new draft law, so-called “lex Google” (already presented in the last EDRi-gram), that may introduce a fee on hypertext links. A “fair remuneration” would be introduced through a fee applied on hypertext links. The draft law also introduces a three-year prison and a 300 000 Euro fine for reproducing or making available “all or part of” press contents, without authorisation.

Facing the perspective of a fee imposed on hyperlinks, Google threatens with excluding the French online press from its searching index. The company believes it has already done enough by bringing traffic to the sites it references.

Google stated that what the draft law was meant for, was actually to interdict unpaid referencing. “According to the draft text that has been circulated since September, a new related right is to be created for a 5-year exclusive period, that would make mandatory the previous authorisation of press bodies for ‘any reproduction, making available for the public for sale, the exchange or communication to the public, online included, of all or a part of the press contents edited under their responsibility’.”

Last year, Google already excluded several Belgium newspapers from its index following a court decision taken a few months before. The situation was however resolved after a off-court settlement between the parties involved.

Google threatens to ban the French press from its searching engine (only in French, 18.10.2012)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/24050-google-menace-de-bannir-la-pres...

For GESTE, Google is not a milk cow but it still has to pay (only in French, 13.10.2012)
http://www.numerama.com/magazine/24015-pour-le-geste-google-n-est-pas-...

The facts about our position on |French copyright proposals (18.10.2012)
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-facts-about-our-pos...

The damaging effects of a draft law meant to interdict unpaid references of press articles in France (only in French, 10.1012)
https://docs.google.com/viewer?srcid=0B92admnS83NKc3pULU5DZkdzQnM&...

EDRi-gram: Ancillary copyright madness in Germany and France (26.09.2012)
http://edri.org/edrigram/number10.18/ancillary-copyright-proposal-madn...