Spain’s insane new compulsory fee for quoting news stories has shut down Google News there — and will prevent any new news search-engines from emerging to replace it.
Under the new amendments to the Ley De Propiedad Intelectual, anyone provides snippets from news articles in a search service must pay a fee for even the briefest of quotations. What’s more, under these rules, newspapers can’t opt out — even if they don’t want the fees, even if they want to let search-engines quote them without encumbrance, they are not allowed to do so.
Yahoo News is also shutting down.
The move is meant to make tax-dodging American companies pay back some of the profits they make from EU businesses, but this also effectively prevents EU businesses from setting up news aggregators — it would be much simpler and fairer to just make Google pay its fucking taxes.
What concerns EFF more is that these ancillary copyright laws form part of a broader trend of derogation from the right to link. This can be seen when you examine the other parts of the Spanish copyright amendments that take effect in January (here in PDF)—notably placing criminal liability on website operators who refuse to remove mere links to copyright-infringing material.
This year’s European Court of Justice ruling against Google Spain on the so-called Right to be Forgotten, is part of the same larger trend, in requiring search engines to remove links to content judged to be “irrelevant”, even if the content is true. We are also disturbed by comments made by new European Digital Commissioner Günther Oettinger who has foreshadowed [German] a broader roll-out of ancillary copyright rules throughout the EU.
Online intermediaries may be a convenient scapegoat for the fading fortunes of European newspaper publishers, but banning the use of text snippets alongside website links is a misguided and—now self-evidently—counter-productive approach. Once it becomes illegal for aggregators to freely link news summaries to publicly-available websites, it becomes that much easier for those who want to prohibit other sorts of links, such as links to political YouTube videos, to make their case.
Google News Shuttered in Spain Thanks to “Ancillary Copyright” Law
[Jeremy Malcolm/EFF]
(Thumbnail: Eyam tombstone, Duncan Harris, CC-BY)