Google has won a victory in Germany where a handful of publishers tried to force Google to take down access to their articles. A regulator handed Google Inc. a victory on Friday as it said it would not pursue a complaint brought against the search provider by Axel Springer SE and Burda in their newly formed group called VG Media. They demanded Google pay them for making their online articles available to the public.
“Sufficient suspicion is always necessary to initiate an abuse procedure. The complaint from VG Media did not establish this,” Andreas Mundt, president of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, said in a statement on Friday
Under a German legislation that came into effect just over a year ago, publishers can prohibit search engines and similar services from using their news articles beyond very short excerpts. The cartel office said, though, that the scope of that legislation was not yet entirely clear. It said it would nonetheless monitor Google’s reaction to publishers’ demands and launch anti-trust proceedings if warranted.
Thank you Reuters for providing us with this information.
Images courtesy of Google.
Electronic Arts (EA) announced today that its games were played for over 11 billion hours…
Steam's annual end-of-year recap, Steam Replay, provides fascinating insights into gamer habits by comparing individual…
GSC GameWorld released a major title update for STALKER 2 this seeking, bringing the game…
Without any formal announcement, Intel appears to have revealed its new Core 200H series processors…
Ubisoft is not having the best of times, but despite recent flops, the company still…
If you haven’t started playing STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl yet, now might be the…