German publishers have called off rebel against Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft

Several largest German-based newspaper and magazine publishers have issued legal actions to be taken against Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. News publishers are looking ahead for an order that will make these tech companies pay 11% of their search engine’s ‘gross sales, including foreign sales’ that come directly and indirectly from making excerpts from online newspapers and magazines public.’

‘German publishers are not just fighting Google. They are fighting the link and thus the essence of the internet’, an article published by Jeff Jarvis on BuzzMachine reads. German publishers seems to be having very strong expectations out of this, as it’s being speculated by several online reports that the move has taken a shape in order to achieve in courts what these German publishers were not really able to taste on their own in the recent years.

Jeff Jarvis on BuzzMachine says, “Google is never going to pay for the right to quote and link to content. That would ruin not only its business but also the infrastructure of knowledge online. If we can find only the knowledge that pays to be found, then the net turns into … oh, I don’t know, a newsstand?’

These are several German publishers who have participated in ‘the action against Google’, including Axel Springer, Burda, WAZ, the Müncher Merkur. Other major publishers including Spiegel Online, Handelsblatt, Sueddeutsche.de, Stern.de and Focus have reportedly chosen not to participate in this debacle.

If we have to talk particularly about Germany, they were always ‘not so happy faces’ to some of Google’s products. As a part of the same, we have seen the country disallowing Street View to be rolled out without a strong opt-out program, which literally caused more than 240,000 German addresses to be pixelated.

Relation between publishers and Google has never been such tedious over any of their services since the past. As we are the strong believers that publishers are also equally responsible for what they are providing to Google, and in order to get their content indexed in Google’s online services including Search and News.