Google closed its Google News service in Spain in response to a new copyright law that made it mandatory for news aggregators, including Google, Yahoo and similar services, to pay licensing fees to news publishers for using their stories or snippets.<\/p>\n
The regulation, which came into effect in 2015, also empowers the Spanish Government to penalise websites that direct links to pirated content with fines of up to $750,000. The law, pushed through by media companies affiliated with AEDE (Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies), an anti-Google lobbying group, contains an unusual provision: it forbids news publishers from licensing their content for free, even if the publisher itself wishes to do so.<\/p>\n
Following Google’s announcement that it would shut down Google News in Spain, media companies associated with AEDE requested the Spanish Government to intervene and prevent the closure. Google News was available in more than 35 languages at the time, covering approximately 70 international editions. Given that the service had been directing significant traffic to Spanish publishers, those publishers faced the prospect of reduced readership and were likely to turn to paid Google AdWords campaigns to compensate for traffic losses. From Google’s perspective, however, Spain represents a comparatively small market.<\/p>\n
Spain’s decision was not without precedent in Europe. In February 2013, Google was required to establish a $75millions fund to support digital publishing innovation in France; in exchange, French publishers agreed not to charge Google for using snippets in its news service. Germany passed a comparable measure, often referred to as the “Google Tax,” granting publishers a one-year exclusive right to profit from their content while permitting them to opt in to Google’s index without triggering a licensing fee obligation. The Spanish law went further by removing the publishers’ option to grant free licences, making a commercial arrangement between Google and Spanish publishers legally unavoidable.<\/p>\n
This article is for general information and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult a qualified attorney before acting on any matter discussed here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Google News closed its operations in Spain due to a new copyright law requiring licensing fees for news aggregators. The regulation signals significant changes for Spanish publishers and digital content regulation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":31,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,22],"tags":[6909,93,6908,121,4598,6999,6907,6998],"class_list":["post-17226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-copyrights","category-intellectual-property","category-ip-commercialization-licensing","tag-aede","tag-copyright-law","tag-digital-publishing","tag-google-news","tag-licensing-fee","tag-media-regulation","tag-news-aggregators","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17226"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149730,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17226\/revisions\/149730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bananaip.com\/intellepedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}