Ancillary copyright (also known as the link tax) is intended to protect publishers from their published texts or parts thereof being made available on other sites free of charge. The law therefore stipulates that, in the future, website operators will have to pay publishers if they collect editorial content from the internet and link it to a headline or a short preview (“teaser”) on their page.
For example, if you search for an event on Google News, the search engine will show you numerous articles from different online newspapers. They have not actually written this content, instead the search engine finds the texts on the internet and uses them to compile search results that are then displayed to you. In fact, this can also be seen as an advantage for the individual newspaper publishers, as the search results link directly to their websites, subsequently attracting more readers and generating even higher advertising revenues.
Google also integrates headlines and entire sections of texts into the preview. For this reason, publishers fear that many users will be content to just read the Google overview and won’t continue reading the rest of the article on their own website. This means that only Google get advertising revenue without having to produce any content of their own.
Aside from Google, there are plenty of other sites that collect content, display a teaser and then link from an external site. Examples of these aggregators are:
- Yahoo News
- Rivva
- Newstral
- Flipboard
- Any kind of RSS reader
The wording of the final agreement is considered questionable by critics. The EU Parliament’s position, for example, is that when an article is linked, the complete title or teaser (section of the text) cannot be used by the copyright holder without a corresponding license. However, the hyperlink itself and individual words should remain legal even without consent. It is still unclear how many words will be allowed.