A Plan for Ancillary Copyright: Original Snippets

The snippets that web search engines generate for their result presentation are extracted from the retrieved web pages, reusing pieces of text that match a user’s query. Copyright owners of the retrieved web pages are typically not asked for usage rights. This long-time practice now faces increasing backlash from news publishers, legal action, and even new legislation in Germany and Spain: the so-called ancillary copyright for news publishers. This copyright law restricts the fair use of intellectual property of news publishers, allowing them to raise claims for monetary compensation when their text is reused, even within snippets. If passed at the EU level, ancillary copyright could severely impact future information system development. This paper promotes a “technological remedy”, namely, to synthesize true original snippets without text reuse.