Last week, Germany's lower house of parliament voted to amend copyright law. The essence of the changes is as follows: within a year from the moment of content creation, only the owner (aka the author) has the right to place it on the Internet, others are obliged to pay for it. Search engines, in particular Google, are an exception, provided that they use a few words in their output, that is, very short fragments of the author's text. After a year has passed since the content was created, it is free for anyone to post.
Copyright laws are quite strict throughout Europe, but does the new law restrict the rights of German-speaking Internet users and webmasters whose sites are hosted on German IPs? Most experts believe that the main disputes will continue between major news sites and those who reprint content, for example, the so-called aggregator sites. It is unlikely that the new German legislation will affect the Ukrainian market of Internet services, namely the number of people willing to purchase foreign hosting, including renting vps in Germany .
Many articles appeared in the press with different opinions about who won and who lost as a result of the decision of the Bundestag. On the one hand, Google is a winner, because they will not have to pay the author a royalty for the use of snippets (the length of which is not regulated by the new law). Publishers claim that they have won because now they will be able to decide how search engines use their content. The most problematic point seems to be the lack of clarity regarding "short text passages". What is it — five words, ten, or the first paragraph? In the near future, we will definitely be watching the development of the situation with Internet freedom in the EU.
