Brussels – In our report on digital trade barriers yesterday for USTR CCIA cited issues from Internet censorship and data transfers to fair use and copyright issues like Germany’s snippet tax. The push by Germany publishers to be able to charge search engines and others for displaying small amounts of text has been working its way through various legal challenges. The following is from CCIA’s DisCo blog post this week on the issue.
One may wonder whether we are at the beginning of a ‘snippet saga’ in Germany. The Copyright Arbitration Board of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) recently recommended that snippets, i.e. small text excerpts used by search engines and online aggregators below hyperlinks, can comprise exactly seven words. This suggestion is part of the DPMA’s recommendation to privately settle a dispute between online services and press publishers over Germany’s ancillary copyright, also termed the ‘snippet levy’. Should a court confirm this recommendation, snippets which go beyond this limit of seven words would in theory have to be licensed from news publishers.
For more see the original post here.