The war between European publishers and Google goes on and new players comes in the field. Alongside with French, German and Italian publishers, also Portuguese and Swiss publishers joined the battle.

The editors of the 5 Countries are coordinating themselves at the International level and are vehemently asking their governments adequate forms of protection for their content into this new “digital age” in order to get adequate remuneration for the exploitation of their works.

Meanwhile in Germany today began the exam of the Parliament of the so called “Lex Google” which is aimed at protecting intellectual property rights online. Meanwhile, “Big G” a few days ago, has launched a signature campaign against the law that would limit (Google said), the freedom of the internet.

Even within the German Parliament are, however, emerging splits on the question whether Google should or should not pay the so-called “ancillary copyright”, a sort of “auxiliary copyright” for few lines of
news available on the web on search engines or news aggregators.

All the publishers involved, including the Italian Fieg, agree that “Big G” has to redistribute to the printed publishers part of its huge advertising revenues. We would like to remind that data released by the World Association of Newspaper showed that, between 2005 and 2011, advertising revenues of newspapers, globally, have fallen from 195 billion to 76 billion US dollars but, at the same time, revenues of newspapers deriving from on online advertising grew just from 2 up to 3.2 billion dollars.

Meanwhile in France has been appointed a moderator in the controversy between publishers and “Big G” to find a solution by the end of the year. Otherwise the French Parliament will intervene with a specific law.

But the European battle against Google is not only focused on copyright. New controversies are attacking “Big G” on central issues: fiscal evasion as well as dominant position in the web search…