Online image search: does France think that the best way to help copyright owners is to deprive them of their rights?
Adding layer after layer: a lways a good idea? As readers will know, this blog has been following with some passion developments leading to the introduction of new layers of protection - in the form of ancillary rights - over content displayed over the internet, eg through news aggregators. Ancillary rights over news content In 2013 Germany adopted new provisions in its Copyright Act ( sections 87f, 87g and 87h) that provide for the exclusive right of press publishers to exploit their contents commercially for one year, thus preventing search engines and news aggregators from displaying non-irrelevant excerpts from newspaper articles without paying a fee. As explained here , the German initiative was aimed at recouping some of the revenues that traditional news publishers have lost to the web. The underlying idea was that news aggregators like Google News would not really boost visits to newspaper we...