Recently, regulators of Germany and France are considering the adoption of measures designed to affect the profits of news aggregators on the internet. Although both proposals do not make express reference to the Mountain View giant, it is clear that the measures, if approved, would constitute some kind of “Google Tax”.
The two countries, however, are placing very different boundaries to their proposals:
- In Germany, the proposal of a so-called “Leistungsschutzrecht” (ancillary copyright law) mainly aims to place the aggregation of editorial contents online under a specific license, which may be granted by the author/editor of such contents, thus giving him the right to require payment of adequate remuneration for its issuance;
- In France, instead, a bill, advocated by some associations of publishers, is proposing to the Parliament a more radical approach: treat as ancillary copyright not only the news aggregating business activities, but also the entire online search engines’, thus considerably increasing the scope of such a hypothetical remuneration of authorship.
Both projects are obviously at embryonic stage, and shall therefore be discussed by the relevant institutions.
However, what seems to emerge, at this state, is the clear intention of the European editors to put a stop to the “free riding“ behavior of aggregators in general, and in particular to their chief representative on the Internet, Google: so far, in fact, all profits made by banner advertising and sponsoring of news contents and search results has escaped any form of fair compensation, only to increase revenues of the most important search engine on the web. However, if Google benefits (in terms of advertising revenues) from the aggregation of content produced by a publisher/editor/author, it seems reasonable to grant to the owner of the original contents some fair share of the economic benefit, just as it is already happening for music videos on youtube, by means of a network of agreements with many collecting societies.
At first glance, the German law proposal, whose content appears to sum up the experience gained by the cited YouTube agreements, has a good chance of being approved as it is, while we are not entirely sure about what the effects of a possible implementation of the French proposal might be: right now, whenever a publisher files a copyright notification to Google, requesting removal of illegal content from the Blogger platform hosting as well from the other products of the brand, the Mountain View company promptly acts to remove such content; the same duly happens to removal requests concerning search results: if properly motivated, they are carried on with diligence by Google (largely after the many legal proceedings it has undergone, during the last years).
What would happen, however, if, by law, a large number of search results suddenly became “payware” for Google?
There are two hypothetical scenarios ahead:
- In the first case, to avoid the fee, Google could introduce automated filters to remove results that involve economic costs: such a provision would, however, greatly deprive of sense the very notion of “global search engine”, and would also create a certain disaffection for the medium – not to mention that, so far, all requests regarding the adoption of such a method filed during legal proceedings have been discarded by Google as  “expensive, inefficient and against freedom of speech”;
- In the second and more likely scenario, however, Google may respond by appealing to the European Court of Justice against such a measure, complaining of unfair barriers to freedom of economic initiative.
We will, therefore, closely keep watch over the two proposals, to see if they are implemented, and what kind of measures will be adopted, against “free-riding” of editorial contents online.

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Last July, the European Commission unveiled a proposal for a Directive in the field of collective management of copyright (COM (2012) 372 final).
This proposal aims to simplify the license management system and establish some base conditions under which it will be possible (and, in some cases, even mandatory) for collecting societies to provide the holders the chance to spread their music rights online, through a system of multi-territorial licenses.
The proposal is based on the principle of freedom to provide services within the EU and, on one hand, establishes the requirements collecting societies must respect, in order to be able to provide multi-territorial licenses; on the other hand, it states that, after a transition period without the collecting society to provide such services, the holders of rights shall be entitled to grant multi-territorial licenses directly or through another intermediary.
Overall, the Directive (if still a proposal) is convincing and correctly aimed to modernize the management of music rights.
However, we cannot fail to notice that similar proposals concerning collective management of audiovisual rights are still progressing at a slower pace than the one at hand, thus favoring the appropriation of such rights on the basis of contractual rules which are difficult to counter by sovranational entities, in the absence of clear and harmonized guidelines on policies for modern licensing, both at european and international level.

During the 2012 Intellectual Property and Innovation Summit, held in Brussels last 10th September, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, strongly underlined, during her speech, the need of a modernization of the Copyright Directive. That Directive was adopted in 2001. The Commission proposals it was based on date back to 1998. But, during this last 15 years, the sector underwent enormous changes. Let’s remind that a social network like Facebook (in 1998 Zuckerberg was fourteen, today almost 1 billion people around the world use Facebook) or YouTube (today, 1 hour video is uploaded every seconds), at the end of last Century, didn’t exist. And the same was for the music sector. At the end of the Ninetyes, music was listened on the radio or cd; today the phisical support is going to disappear thanks to innovation:
streaming and downloading. Kroes, concluded her speech encouraging to act: “Let’s
act right now: for artists, consumers, for our economy.

Meanwhile in the Usa, it seems to be ready what is defined “The Us Hadopi”. The measure is based on 6 strikes and aims to punish the illegal downloading and file sharing. Jill Lesser, head of the new “Center for Copyright Information” wants to underline that this measure will be useful only for educative purposes and so is very different from the French law Hadopi. At the moment is really difficult make a comment because it seems quite impossible have more information. The (declared) aim is to let young people understand the risks of the illegal downloading. But, obviously, there will be punishments for the violators, established by the different operators.

Back to Europe, the French Hadopi is still very discussed. When François Hollande
was elected as new French President, the Hadopi started to weaver. And the future of the “Haute Autorité” seems to be uncertain. But the controversy aroused again the day after the first sentence: 150 euros as punishment for a 40 years man accused of illegal music downloading. “What is the sense of a so expensive bureaucratic machine (11 million euros a year) if the results are so “weak”? is the question posed by the French Ministry of Culture, Aurelie Filippetti.

Last 30th August, the controversy  on the protection of intellectual property rights in the digital era has comed to the fore of International newspapers because of the new law, approved by the German Government, aimed at protecting the copyrights of publishers of online newspapers.

The so-called “Lex Google” will oblige search engines to pay a fee to publishers, mainly for Google News. The rule intended to ensure a fair share of the royalties that the Mountain View’s Giant gets, according to many, in a  ”parasitic” way.

As expected, the public opinion was split: on one hand, the broad support of the German publishers and those who wants a strong protection of the copyright; on the
other hand strong criticism from the “green party” and the “pirate party”.

Google, immediately after the approval, said that it was a “black day” for the net.

The German Ministry of Culture, Bernd Naumann (of the christian-democratic party)
is deeply convinced that the Government has done an important thing for the protection of copyright in the digital era.

10 days after the France arose: French publishers pretend a law that oblige search
engines to pay for the use of their content. The heads of the newspapers “Nouvelle Observateur”, “Figaro” ed “Echoes” required a law to the French government, similar to the German “Lex Google”.

Frencis Morel, President and General Director of “Echoes” declared that this law will undermine mainly the Mountain View’s Giant, that wheighs on the market more than 90% on the “online search”. After that Morel criticized the fiscal evasion of “Big G” that, as well know, is based in Ireland.

Marc Feuillée, General Director of the Figarò Group precised that, differently from the German law, directed mainly against news aggregators like “Google News”, the proposed French law is aiming at the “web search”, in particular the content.

Feuillée argues that the text could be submitted to the Parliament and become law by the end of 2012.

A few days ago, the search engine based on Mountain View announced (through its official blog at the address: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/08/an-update-to-our-search-algorithms.html) that, after the analysis on the state of the web taken some months ago, it will put online a new revision of its search algorythm, specifically designed to contrast audiovisual piracy.

Starting from next week, Google shall keep track of the number of valid copyright violation reports received against a specific website, and move it down the search results, should the number of such reports be relevantly high.

Theoretically, the method has been studied to reduce the visibility of most websites expressly dedicated to illegal file sharing.
However, it is still unclear the scenario that will outline, following a copyright infringement report:

- if the report is correctly filed, but its contents are wrong, an automated “downgrade” of the website in Google’s search results would cause severe damage to the website, both in terms of visibility and economic support from any advertising sponsors it might have;

- if the report is correct in form and content, instead, one might wonder why the penalty should be limited to “lowering” such website on the search results, instead of removing it entirely, as the search engine has been doing so far.

While awaiting to see how the online research giant will enact the announced actions, we can only note that the new mechanism seems to be set to deepen and speed up in some way the monitoring of search results, while at the same time avoiding to enact those pre-emptive and capillary measures requested by many players of the audiovisual market, which would deprive Google of its “mere conduit” role, on which it based all its defenses in front of European and international Courts so far.