Posted on 02/22/2014 6:17:51 AM PST by daniel1212
MADRID: News media companies in Spain will be able to charge search engines such as Google for displaying copyrighted content under a new law proposed by the Spanish government on Friday.
The measure echoes similar drives around Europe. Publishers in Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany have pushed for compensation in some form or another for links, snippets, headlines and lead paragraphs that appear in news search engines and aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo! news.
The search engines draw revenue from advertising placed near news content and media companies have fought for a share of it.
The new rule was introduced in the draft of an intellectual property law that the centre-right People's Party government will present to parliament for approval, Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria told a weekly news conference.
Under the proposed changes, the search engines would not have to seek permission to publish brief fragments but would have to pay "an equitable remuneration for the use..."
A year ago Google agreed to pay 60mil euros (RM270.92mil) into a special fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet, but search engines will not pay publishers in France for displaying content.
Germany passed a new copyright law last March that allows media there to charge search engines for using their content, but the original bill was watered down and links and small excerpts of text were exempted.
Spain's proposed reform on search engines and content is just one element in a major overhaul of intellectual property rules that the government has been working on since last year. .
Simple. Probably search engines will not allow links to venues where they have to pay. Those who seek payment will simply lose their viewers.
Probably FR will not allow links to paid sites. (When we go to those sites now, via link, they demand either payment or subscription to read the rest of the article.)
Enough free stuff will be available that the impact to FR will most likely be negligible.
It’s odd, Walter Lippmann in his 1921 book “Public Opinion’ addressed this issue, that people expected their news for free.
How long will Spain hold out if Google decides to blackball all of the sites covered by this edict? If no one searching for news ever goes to a paid Spanish site and their revenue drops by 90%, they’ll be paying Google to link to them again.
The law unintended consequences will not pass away.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.(and greed)
Really. What will happen is that Google and such will go to alternative sites for the news, as often is done here for stories.
What about Drudge?
Crazy. Site operators/owners spend a great deal of time trying to attract search engines, not drive them away.
There’s Free Republic, then the rest of the internet.
Spanish ideas of fair use differ from US ideas, so it might not even happen.
Freepers posting from sources unfriendly to the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works should learn to re-write the source material and post their own version here.
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