Proposed German Copyright Law Is Just a ‘Snippet’ of What’s Ahead for Search Engines reports that Germany’s proposed “ancillary copyright law” may actually allow news orgs and other content creators to charge companies like Google for reproducing their content in search engine snippets (I don't think this is why Google killed their RSS reader btw.. )

But what will really happen if it passes? We asked Andowah Newton, a litigation associate at Mintz Levin in New York City, to walk us through the possibilites.

“Interested parties on both sides of the debate have declared the vote on Germany’s ‘ancillary copyright’ law as a ‘win’ for each of their respective sides,” Newton said. ”Both declarations are correct. On the one hand, search engines and news aggregators would ‘win’ by maintaining the right to use snippets of publishers’ news content without having to pay the publishers a fee. On the other hand, publishers would ‘win’ by having their exclusive right to commercialize their news content (aside from the snippets) declared and validated by law.”