Recently, the Spanish government passed a new copyright law which imposes fees for online content aggregators such as Google News, in an effort to protect its print media industry. The new law known as the “Google Tax” or by its initials LPI, requires services which post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the organisation representing Spanish newspapers, the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies (known by its Spanish-language abbreviation AEDE). The law is the latest volley in the war between European newspapers and Google. The publishers accuse the search firm of using their copyrighted material to build up a news service without doing any reporting itself. The company says that it is “disappointed” with Spain’s new law. “We believe that services like Google News help publishers bring traffic to their sites. As far as the future is concerned, we will continue working with the Spanish publishers to help increase their revenues while we evaluate our options within the framework of the new legislation.”
- Failure to pay up can lead to a fine of up to €600,000.
- Google defends itself by claiming that it 10 billion views to newspapers’ websites every month.
- That requirement doesn’t require copyright holders to go through a judge before demanding links be removed, while imposing fines of €600,000 on sites which don’t act.
- Once it comes into action at the beginning of 2014, the country will also require websites to remove links to material that infringes copyright, even if the websites themselves don’t make money from the infringement.
In my opinion, I believe this can be beneficial and save the Newspaper industry within Spain.
No comments:
Post a Comment