Woops: charging for news copyright in Spain

LONDON — Google News is saying goodbye to Spain.

The website, which compiles headlines and summaries of news articles from various sources, will go dark in Spain on Dec. 16. Google plans to shut the site there in protest of a new law that would force the company and other news aggregators to pay Spanish publishers for the use of their content.The rules, which come into force in January, do not specify how much Google and others like Yahoo News would have to pay per article. But they carry a potential one-time $750,000 fine if companies do not comply with the law.

 The legislation follows similar rules in other countries, including France and Germany, that allow publishers to charge when parts of their articles are included in Google’s news aggregation. In those countries, the company has tended to come to terms with the publishers, rather than withdraw from the field. But the Spanish rule will not allow local publishers to forgo such payments.

And in the case of Spain, it is not clear what parties, if any, will benefit from the new rules.

While the law is aimed at providing much-needed revenue to Spanish publishers, which are struggling to generate income from their online offerings, the loss of Google News and the traffic that it sends to local newspapers may end up hurting publishers that often rely on the company’s service to direct people to their websites. In Germany, some publishers have opted to waive their right to demand fees, rather than lose the traffic Google sends their way.

But Google’s dominance of Europe’s online world — its search business holds a market share of about 85 percent, bigger than in the United States — has European officials trying to rein it in.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/google-to-drop-its-news-site-in-spain/?_r=0


According to BBC Tech Tent http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02dk0t5 broadcast 12 Dec 2014 the proponents of the law in Spain, following Google's withdrawal started to suggest the law should be reversed because they have seen that the lack of traffic will be more costly that the income potential from Google.