Google and France President Francois Hollande, on Friday, announced a deal that the search giant has made with French publishers to who want to be paid for the content that Google links to.
Google agreed to create a €60 million fund called the DIgital Publishing Innovation Fund to “help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers.” Google says it will also “deepen” its partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using Google’s ad technology.
Though Google has indicated that it hopes to reach similar agreements with publishers in other countries, it doesn’t look like those in Germany are going for it. Germany’s The Local reports that German newspapers have rejected the idea of copying the agreement Google made with French publishers:
The German association of newspaper publishers (BDZV) said the French agreement did have some positive points. The major of these was that it was established and accepted “that the aggregation of content from third parties as a business model costs them money,” said Anja Pasquay, BDZV spokeswoman on Sunday.
But she said a drawback was that the French solution only referred to Google. “The publishers there have no legal recourse against other aggregators who operate in the same fashion – or those who will do so in the future,” she said.
Back in December, Google made a deal with publishers in Belgium. While not exactly the same as the one it made in France, it seems that German publishers would take similar issue with such a deal.
