And like critics of ancillary law firm businesses, the Securities and Exchange Commission has expressed concern that auditors in a diversified company might not be truly independent from big clients that paid them more in consulting fees than they paid for their corporate auditing.
As recently noted in an article in Waging Nonviolence, SB 1070 provides a "rare opportunity" for direct civil disobedience in the sense that people will be willfully violating the very law in question in itself, rather than the typical scenario where an ancillary law (e.g., trespassing, blocking traffic) is violated in protest of some larger policy.
The proposed ancillary copyright law, which is to have its first reading Friday in the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, has ignited a storm of hyperbole pitting Google and local Web advocates against powerful publishers including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bild and Die Welt.
If the ancillary copyright law passes, fines would be imposed for unlicensed use of publishers' snippets.
That ancillary copyright law, catchily known as 'Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger' in German, ended up being watered down to excuse Google from a requirement to pay for using snippets.
Regarding Article 11, Europe already has experience experimenting with a neighboring right for news, after an ancillary copyright law was enacted in Germany in 2013.
Regarding Article 11, Europe already has experience experimenting with a neighboring right for news, after an ancillary copyright law was enacted in Germany in 2013.
However the group appears to be continuing to hope its civil action against Google will yield fruit next year, when the German Patent and Trademark office will consider the scope and applicability of the ancillary copyright law.
Spain also enacted a similar ancillary copyright law for publishers in 2014, but its implementation required publishers to charge for using their snippets — leading Google to permanently close its news aggregation service in the country.
The draft ancillary copyright law (online here in German) gets an expert hearing in a legal committee today, ahead of the second reading (German law requires three readings before a law can be passed), and is backed by the majority of the governing coalition — having being included in the coalition agreement between the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democratic Party.
When the ancillary copyright law came into force in Germany in summer 2013 several major German publishers initially opted not to pull their snippets from Google, presumably fearing the impact of doing so on their traffic — given that other publishers' snippets would inevitably become more visible in search results.
