The War on Text
Every few months the internet mobilizes around a new existential threat to the open web, and in Germany in 2012 that threat arrived with a name that sounds like a minor administrative procedure: Leistungsschutzrecht. Ancillary copyright for press publishers. Which, like all the worst legislation, tells you absolutely nothing about what it actually does.
Here’s the backdrop. German copyright law already had no meaningful equivalent of the American fair use doctrine—that principle which lets you quote a passage, remix an image, or riff on a work in a creative context without automatically becoming a defendant. If you copied someone’s full article onto your blog or lifted their photos without permission, you were already on thin ice. There was a reasonable argument to be made that Germany needed to move toward something like fair use, to recognize that incorporating existing material creatively was a net social good. This law did the opposite. Instead of expanding what’s permitted, it handed major publishers the legal right to charge or pursue you for doing things like quoting a sentence, tweeting a headline, or simply linking to an article on Facebook. Twelve things any of us does before the first coffee, all suddenly potential invoices or court summonses.
The law was driven primarily by Axel Springer—the conglomerate behind Bild, Die Welt, and a significant slice of German media—along with the wider publishing establishment. Bild was naturally enthusiastic. So was Bunte. So, apparently, was the Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung, a regional paper serving a town of eighty thousand people, which tells you something about the breadth of publisher appetite for this particular meal ticket. Morally impeccable institutions, every one of them.
The reasoning, such as it is: publishers were watching their revenue model dissolve into the internet and wanted compensation from whoever was profiting from the circulation of their content. Google, aggregators, bloggers passing around excerpts—all getting value from publisher output without paying for it. That’s the theory. In practice the law was drafted broadly enough to threaten anyone who pointed at a news article online. The smallest act of reference—a link, a snippet, a one-sentence summary on social media—could trigger a licensing demand or a visit from someone in a gray suit.
This was happening directly on the heels of the SOPA and ACTA fights, those global mobilizations against attempts to restructure the web around intellectual property enforcement. You’d think the lesson had been absorbed. It hadn’t. The publishers were simply running a more local version of the same play: identify the mechanism that forces everyone else to pay for an attention economy they helped build, lock it in legislatively before the political resistance organizes. The internet functions because information circulates, because links exist, because people point at things and say look at this. Put a toll booth on that gesture and you don’t have a web anymore. You have cable television with a comment section.
What genuinely exhausts me—and I’m pulling my attention away from things that are actually pleasurable to write about in order to say this—is that the same legislative energy capable of addressing real structural problems, platform monopolies, mass data extraction, algorithmic manipulation of public discourse, keeps getting redirected toward protecting incumbents from the consequences of not adapting. The publishers had years to figure out how to make the internet work for them. They chose this instead. Every few months a new front. Same war.
Tie-wearing nuisances with delusions of grandeur. Leave the web alone. We have better things to do.