EU Copyright Official Wants Google To Pay

The European Union’s new digital economy and society commissioner, Günter Oettinger, wants to create an EU-wide copyright law to replace its current patchwork of national laws. Part of that may include expanding Germany’s “ancillary copyright for press publishers” law, passed in 2013, which gives publishers the right to demand royalties from news aggregators like Google News. That law has not been successful in Germany, however, where efforts to extract cash from Google were suspended after the company threatened to simply delist German sources.