Why should Google be able to profit off of others content without compensating them? Compulsory licenses are standard in the music industry, and in theory the same could work well for journalism. But the devil is in the details.
By that logic, should the phonebook have to pay people to include them? Should the travel pamphlet pay the restaurants it sends people to? Using snippets of the content to send people to the source is essential for online dialogue, not just for Google. Should we all have to pay for referring to an article in a forum?
Mark my words: if this were enforced, people and most companies would simply stop linking these sites. What I think will happen instead is that many websites would not want this kind of situation, so we will add a new clause to the robots.txt permitting linking and small snippets, and most websites would enable it rather than lose the link and search traffic. Then we'd be back where we started.
By the way, what happens when an European newspaper is hosted in US? What laws apply?
If a website doesn't want its content to be summarized by Google couldn't they just block it in their robots.txt? From what I've seen that results in Google listing the page's title but with no description.
Maybe search engines could adopt some sort of standard that would allow pages to provide their desired description using meta tags if they don't want an automated summary. I could see a problem with pages using dishonest summaries, but perhaps that could be addressed by penalizing the page rank if the provided summary is too different than the summary that Google would have generated.
As do the pages. All this has been tested before in Germany with the Leistungsschutzrecht. Even before it was struck down by the courts it was more or less not active anymore. Google just stopped sending traffic to the pages of the German publishers. It took only a few days until Axel Springer & Co. came crawling back and made a deal with Google that they are allowed to link without compensation.
