Searching the Future of Newspapers: With a Little Help from Google and IP law?

Abstract

A paper called Relation aller Furnemmen un gedenckwurdigen Historien, printed in Strasbourg in 1605, is often seen as the world’s first newspaper. Knowledge of this kick-start of the press is taken from a petition by the publisher, found in the Municipal Archives of Strasbourg. With this petition, Johann Carolus, printer and publisher, asked for a monopoly right so as to protect his investment against those fellows who copy news. Some 400 years later, the successors of Johann Carolus share his feeling of being in need of protection. Their investment in getting information, researching facts, selecting news, writing stories and editing papers is no longer as profitable as it was, and thus, newspaper companies are in dire straits to find a new business model. One model is to take money from those who profit from the diligently compiled content in the digital age – Google for instance. Germany and France have dealt with the request to skim off some profits from the search engine giant. The solutions in the two countries are completely different in design, but they do teach three lessons for intellectual property in the digital age. The starting point for making Google and the like pay is the use of ‘‘snippets’’, i.e. small extracts from newspapers on websites and particularly in the search engines run by Google. These brief excerpts are combined with so-called ‘‘deep links’’ to the articles from which they were taken. In Paperboy, the German Federal Supreme Court ruled that such news services on websites neither violate the database or other rights of publishers nor are unfair for bypassing the starting page