An unsubstantiated rumor, which is what defines a rumor in the first place, has it that a German gardener is allegedly planning to sue a local beekeeper for a share of the profits he made from a bee hive.
Flora D., the gardener, has everything ready to file a complaint in court as soon as the latest weirdness in German copyright law is upheld by the legal system.
For those readers not familiar with wingnut nature of the so called ancillary copyright, known to lay people like us as the Google law, here is a summary.
Google presents small snippets of text from news websites in the Google News overview. German publishers managed to convince the conservative government that they should get a share of the profit Google makes from this aggregation of news.
The fact that Google does not display ads on these news pages and drives traffic to the publishers websites is ignored as irrelevant by German law makers. We speculate the thinking is that Google is making so much money, there should be some left over of the ailing German print publishers.
The German internet being the "me too" web and courts easily duped into going after imaginary rights violations, various companies are suing Google to get their money snippets.
This is the backdrop for the model law suit envisaged by Flora D. and her lawyer H. P. Graph, famously nicknamed Paragraph by fellow graduates of a law school we have never heard of.
The complaint against the beekeeper states that his bees essentially function as a aggregators of pollen from surrounding gardens and fields, very much the same way Google, or Bing collect snippets of news articles.
Individual tiny clumps of pollen are snippets of the flower, and the beekeeper, said Graph, maintains hives for the purpose of producing honey, a marketable and valuable commodity. We will present to the court a strong case for bees being nothing but natural bots scurrying the web of organic life, gathering and centralizing pollen. Presenting bees as natural bots should convince a generation of legal professionals who grew up on video games.
Planting ornamental flowers or managing fruit trees like my client, Ms. Flora D., has been recognized as a valuable skill since the early days of mankind, long before even rudimentary writing was introduced.
Making money off of her skills without fair compensation is a glaring injustice, especially so if you consider that the print publishers who have been around for a few centuries are enjoying protection under the law. As to those who claim that the bees perform a service to the plant through pollination, this is nothing but the equivalent of Google driving traffic to publisher sites. The bees enabling Ms. D. to sell a few apples is very much equivalent to Google enabling publishers to sell more periodicals.
Our case against the beekeeper furthermore has one compelling argument in favor of my client. That argument is the life of the bees in commercial hives depends on my client and others like her raising flowers and trees for the bees.
This is in stark and material contrast to the importance of German publishers for the health and well-being of Google. If German publishers stopped producing letters and sentences today, Google or Bing or others like them would not suffer any setback.
Asked if he is trying to organize German farmers to join the Flora lawsuit, Mr. Graph declined to confirm, stating only that residual income has gained popularity with farmers leasing land for wind turbines.
[satire] -- the tag du jour on the web.
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