In the past few days, a major development occurred in Germany that will have a profound effect on copyright laws over the internet going forward. Originally, the German parliament was sponsoring a bill that would have negative effects on internet search engines, particularly Google, who has links to various news sources scattered across websites all over the internet. The legislation would allow for newspapers and other news sources require search engines to stop showing these links unless the company agreed to pay licensing fees to the new source. However, heavy lobbying by Google has resulted in the bill being severely watered down. Now, the bill states that while news sources can now require charging search engines for the printing of full texts, the search engines still have free reign in using small snippets of text in advertising links. The bill has passed in the lower house of the German parliament and is awaiting a vote in the upper house. Google is calling this a victory for the free internet movement, but what effect this development actually ends up producing remains to be seen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/02/technology/german-copyright-law-targets-google-links.html