Last week, Markus Keßler from Futurezone.at interviewed EU-Commissioner Günther Oettinger. Besides geoblocking, net neutrality and data preservation, the ancillary copyright for press publishers was also a topic on the list.

Being asked for his plans regarding a European ancillary copyright for press publishers, Oettinger answered reticently. "While working on reforming the copyright laws, we will evaluate if we are able to build an equally working [like in Germany] set of rules within Europe." In a former interview Oettinger gave the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on March 30th, his answer sounded a bit different. He is cited to have that a European ancallary copyright for press publishers will be an inherent part of his upcoming copyright reform. Furthermore in December 2014 on a meeting of the European Parliament’s copyright working group, Oettinger expressed his wish for such a law.

The chance to force conditions on Google does Günther Oettinger evaluate as high. Google had a high interest in being able to do business within the European market. Therefore the company would think long and hard, "whether they do or do not want to start a fight with us." As a reminder: Google News Spain was permanently shut down after the company was forced by law to pay a royalty when they link to articles by displaying news snippets in search results.

Commissioner Oettinger sees his goal accomplished as soon as the publishers can freely decide whether they want to give away their product in exchange for money, or whether they want to enable another company - for marketing reasons - to present and share their product without paying anything. Oettinger completely suppresses the existence of robots.txt and pay walls here.

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