Google and other online news aggregators in Germany may continue to show short news items on their sites without being required to pay the original content producers. A majority of lawmakers from the government coalition supported the legislation that allows companies such as Google to display "single words or very small text excerpts" referring to publishers' websites at no cost, Bloomberg reports. For content exceeding these limits, publishers retain the exclusive right of use, according to the copyright law passed by the Bundestag. Google, which doesn't display ads on its news aggregator pages in Europe, argued its so-called "snippets" are actually helping publishers by driving traffic to their sites.
