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Hollande wants search engines to pay for linking articles- paper

PARIS | Sun Oct 28, 2012 2:59pm EDT

PARIS Oct 28 (Reuters) - French President Francois Hollande is in favour of a law to force Internet search engines like Google to pay a fee for displaying links to newspaper articles, daily Le Figaro reported on Sunday.

Press associations in France and other European countries want Google to pay when it displays links to newspapers in Internet searches. In return, Google has threatened to stop indexing articles from the French press.

Le Figaro said Hollande, who is due to meet with Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt on Monday, told representatives of the French regional press last week that he would back legislation for a search levy as soon as January.

Budget Minister Jerome Cahuzac said search engines like Google captured part of the value added in an article when they indexed them.

Asked on France 5 television whether Google should be taxed for indexing news, he said: "How long can the international community accept the evaporation of value-added, whether it's in France, German and Spain?"
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Comments (6)
DavidSG wrote:
Google should simply cut France off from its search engines.

Oct 28, 2012 4:13pm EDT  --  Report as abuse
djbeame wrote:
The French press association should better educate their members on how to monetize the traffic on their end that google gives them access to. If their articles are important enough people will pay for it. If not, they won’t.

Oct 28, 2012 6:24pm EDT  --  Report as abuse
smokinhottie wrote:
ipadmapper just got sued for doing this to craiglist and craiglist has been hitting everyone else with a cease and desist for doing this exact thing that google does.. grab a snippet of their info and promotee it. Why should it be fair for google to do this but nobody else? That’s a controlled monopoloy. Google should have to pay a price for every site it “scrapes”. That’s essentially all the big search engine is.. a refined scraping tool.

Oct 28, 2012 6:31pm EDT  --  Report as abuse
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