Several weeks ago a law was passed in Germany. In that search engines like Google to pay publishers to license content to include links and snippets in aggregation services like Google News. Google has been vocally opposing this law and others like it for quite some time, but nevertheless, it passed.
Google discussed the changes in a blog post. The post is in German, but here is a portion of it as translated by Google Translate:
In light of this development, and in light of the legal uncertainty that comes from the law, we have a new confirmation system introduced. With this we offer German publishers another way to tell us whether their contents (continued) to be displayed in Google News. This new confirmation statement is an addition to the existing technical possibilities for publishers to determine for themselves whether their contents to be displayed in our services – or not. Such tools such as robots.txt be recognized alongside Google and many other search engines and Internet services.
In all other countries, we will maintain in force, proven process: if a publisher makes its content available on the net, they are included in Google News. If publishers do not wish to be included in Google News, you can use a variety of technical options (robots.txt, meta tags) use to prevent indexing by Google – or simply tell us that their content will not be recorded. This is the best way to ensure that a wide variety of publishing votes are represented in our service -., Not just those who have the administrative resources and the time for such processes the digital future presents many industries with new challenges and opportunities. The news industry is one of them. We have always made it clear during the discussions on the related right that we want to continue working with publishers together on solutions.