Google News Shuttered in Spain Thanks to "Ancillary Copyright" Law

EFF.org
Dec. 11, 2014

Today, Google has announced that it will be permanently shutting down the Spanish version of Google News, effective from December 16, 2014. The shutdown comes in direct response to amendments to the Spanish intellectual property law (Ley De Propiedad Intelectual) imposing a compulsory fee for the use of snippets of text to link to news articles, by online news aggregators that provide a search service.

A similar fee was first introduced in German law in 2013, where it was described as an "ancillary copyright" (or Leistungsschutzrecht). But the fee actually has no heritage in copyright law, which preserves the right to make quotations without remuneration under international law (in fact, it is the only such mandatory limitation to copyright). The German law has been a manifest failure, where publishers willingly forfeited their right to payment from Google, as soon as they realized how much traffic they would lose from not being indexed on Google News.

Spain decided to one-up Germany by making the right to payment inalienable, so that even the news organization quoted is not permitted to waive it. The shuttering of Google News was therefore predictable, and it is hard to see what value this has achieved for the press in Spain or for Spanish (and Spanish speaking) Internet users. Time will tell whether Yahoo News will follow suit--since Yahoo, unlike Google, does monetize its news service with ads.

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