First contracts signed between Google and German publishers

After Google reached an amicable agreement with the French news agency AFP, contracts with German counterparts are now on the agenda. Google obviously wants to prophylactically avoid the dilemma in France. After all, it looks as if the search engine giant has decided to act in Germany before it also comes to a legal dispute in this country.

Named contract partners

As part of its contract negotiations, Google has enlisted big players in the German news landscape. The Handelsblatt and Der Spiegel, for example, are also involved. All new contractual partners are now to receive remuneration in the sense of ancillary copyright on the basis of the EU copyright amendment introduced in 2019. Philipp Justus, Google’s head of Central Europe, today informed the public about the contractual agreements between the U.S. Internet company and German publishers. Which remunerations were contractually determined in detail, however, is unknown.

Other contractual partners to follow

But with partners such as Spiegel and the time is not yet to be reached the end of the flagpole. Google speaks of the fact that contracts have already been discussed with other news portals. In addition to “classic” news portals, online portals such as Golem.de are also to be involved. Justus himself also commented on parameters concerning the payment of publishers. Uniform parameters have been developed that are to be used for the remuneration of content.

The basis of the agreements between Google and the publishers is the ancillary copyright. This means that simple links or extremely short content in the form of “snippets” are not covered by the agreements concluded. Instead, the contracts focus on “extended previews of news”. Since these are always displayed in a representative manner in Google News, the disputes between the search engine and the publishers arose in the first place. The Google manager for Central Europe himself nevertheless took Google’s actions in stride by saying:

“Google’s services create significant added value for publishers in the form of traffic, advertising technology and financial support”

So, from Google’s point of view, it is rather a great advantage for publishers when Google displays excerpts of the article on its news page. Finally, the search engine increases the traffic of the providers. According to the manager, Google would not earn any money from this in the absence of advertisements. However, we already know this argument from other areas.

Finally an end in sight

The trend can be observed throughout Europe. Finally, Google is currently approaching many publishers across Europe in the wake of the introduction of the new EU copyright amendment in 2019. The fear of high penalties resulting from a breach of the protection of ancillary copyrights is too great. In particular, the high demand on the part of the collecting society Corint Media might just be symbolic of Google’s efforts. The company demanded retrospective royalties of 420 million euros. So far, the search engine giant has been outraged by the high demand and rejects it as “baseless”. To avoid such scenarios in the future, the contracts are likely to be of great importance for Google. After all, Google is afraid of “claims that are neither economically nor legally justified”.