The new Spanish Intellectual Property Law and the “Google Tax.”
Last October 2014, the Spanish parliament approved a new Intellectual Property Law which is going to introduce many changes, including regulations on how material subjected to Intellectual Property rights can be published on the Internet. It is a modification of the already existing Law 1/1996 of the 12 April and law 1/2000 of the 7 of January.
It will go into application partially in January 2015 and fully in May 2015.
There is a lot of criticism about this law in particular from media and internet professionals.
The Google Tax
One of the most controversial articles of the law has been nicknamed the “Google Tax”, and has the objective to regulate Internet content aggregators. In practice any specialized internet content aggregators like Google News and Yahoo News (with a different interpretation of the law texts it could include as well Twitter, Facebook and news blogs) will have to pay a fee (an unspecified “fair compensation” according to the law text) to editors for reproducing article snippets (textually from the law “fragments of content, circulated via periodical publications or on webpages that are periodically updated and that are aimed at informing, creating public opinion or entertaining”).
This has been applauded by AEDE (Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles) the association of Spanish Daily newspapers. AEADE and traditional media companies blame services like Google News to steal their contents.
The reality is much more complex. Media Companies make profits from the adverts on their web pages, precisely from visitors seeing the page or from visitors clicking on the adverts (respectively pay per impression and pay per click models). Content aggregators collect news from media companies and drive traffic to the media websites. Recent statistics show that newspaper websites like “El Pais” or ·”El Mundo” receives from 20% to 50% of their traffic from Google News. In other words Google is responsible of a good part of the income of news websites. With the “google tax” media companies are biting the hand that feeds them and show a profound lack of understanding of the digital media business.
“Google Tax” in Germany, France and Belgium
In other European countries similar laws have been passed (namely Belgium, France and Germany). The key difference with Spain is that the charge is unavoidable. Spanish media groups won’t be able to choose whether to make content aggregators pay or not, they will be forced to charge (probably to level competition among newspapers).
In Germany instead editors charging Google were excluded from Google news search results, making that the large majority of German news groups authorized aggregators to use their content for free.
In France news groups and Google came to an agreement were Google accepted to pay a 60 million euro help package to the struggling French newspaper industry.
Google response
Google officially responded on the 11 December 2014 that it will shut down its Google news service in Spain from the 16 of December 2014. The argument is simple: Google doesn’t get any profit from Google News (google news is a page without adverts) and thus it doesn’t make any sense to pay to keep the page alive.
In practice:
1) Spanish news services will be deindexed from Google News. In other words a visitor from Spain or outside Spain won’t be able anymore to find news from Spanish media sources.
2) It will be still possible to find pages from Spanish media services from the normal organic google search. Probably not in real time like with
Google News
Foreseeing what is going to happen is quite difficult. In its official response you can infer that AEDE was surprised of Google’s reaction as it was expecting that Google would become a new source of income. Both parties (google and AEDE) claim to be open for further negotiations.
As of the 22 of December 2014, http://news.google.es has been shut down. Nevertheless if we do a normal Google search we can still see the related Google News results from Spanish news services, by choosing the “News” tab on the search result page. From this we can infer that Spanish news services have not been deindexed from Google News.