‘Spain’s new IP reforms lead to the exit of Google News’, in this report Alejandro Touriño, Information Technology partner at ECIJA, shares his views on the Google News case in Spain.
Google shut down its Spanish Google News service on 16 December, in a move that anticipated the coming into force, on 1 January 2015, of reforms to Spain’s Copyright Act, which makes it compulsory for news aggregation sites such as Google News to pay a fee to the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies (AEDE) if the aggregator uses a headline or a snippet from a publisher’s news story.
Google has argued, via its blog, that as Google News does not generate revenue, the reforms mean that the service is “unsustainable” in Spain. The Spanish reforms echo attempts by publishers in Germany to sue Google over the use of snippets, which have resulted in dramatic falls in traffic to publisher websites after Google removed the sites from Google News.“Taking into account the results in Germany it seems very likely that Spanish publishers may also experience a drastic fall in their traffic and hence in income from advertising,” said Alejandro Touriño, Partner at ECIJA.
While news articles from Spanish publishers will continue to be found on Google’s main search engine, Spanish publishers’ content will be removed from Google’s news aggregating products globally.
“Payment to publications has been made compulsory and newspapers cannot wave their right to collect, as collection is made through the AEDE,” explains Pablo Hernández Arroyo, Head of Copyright and Media at Elzaburu.“That’s a key difference to the German Law where each publication can negotiate, and that’s why some papers are claiming that the recently implemented Act should be changed, acknowledging the limits of national laws to impose a solution in global markets.”
However, Touriño believes that news aggregation services and publishers can co-exist, comparing the situation now to when TV producers began broadcasting shows using snippets from those of competitors.
“In that case, the Spanish Supreme Court decided that to reproduce snippets from competitors, their prior consent is needed,” explains Touriño.
“Regarding online aggregators, in my view,using snippets from competitors would need authorisation from legitimate right holders but I would suggest defining limits to these practices that may permit the use of non-relevant parts of third parties’ works without permission, provided that the projected use of the work does not represent a relevant profit to the aggregator and/or a relevant loss to the right holder.”
Please read original report here: ‘Spain’s new IP reforms lead to the exit of Google News’
