You may recall talk of a proposed law in Germany that would require search engines like Google to pay to license content from publishers in order to display headlines (with links) and snippets of text.

Lawmakers in Germany are reportedly debating such legislation today, and Google has put out a video and a petition, calling on German web users to resist.

The Motley Fool is reporting:

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) is facing what promises to be some hard-fought litigation in Germany, over a proposed copyright bill supported by the German newspaper industry that would mean Google would need to pay a portion of advertising revenue to any German newspaper whose articles turned up in search results next to those ads. They believe that it is their work that is attracting the traffic, so they deserve the advertising revenue, and Germany has some of the toughest data privacy laws in Europe. Google obviously sees the issue differently, and believes that this would be a slippery slope that would lead to paying anyone whose work turned up in search results, and would be to the detriment of every Internet user in Germany. The company enters its first round of debates in the German parliament this Thursday.

This is just the latest in the ongoing battle between Google and publishers. Google has recently been dealing with a similar situation in France.

Brazilian newspapers have actually banded together and pulled out of Google News, rather than waiting for any legislation to require Google to pay them.