Tax on Linking to Media Prompts Google News to Abandon Spain

Spain’s attempt to extract money from Google to
transfer over to media outlets inside the country are going to
fail, but it will be consumers who will suffer for it. The country
passed a law permitting—no requiring—news publishers to
demand payment for having even small portions of their text
aggregated by others online. There are a lot of sites that do this,
but certainly Google News is a top provider, particularly for
anybody looking for news coverage in or from other countries.

It looks like we’ll have to find other sources to help keep
track of news about Spain. In response to the legislation, Google
is not going to be handing over money to Spanish media outlets
because the excerpted a couple of sentences and provided a link.
Instead they’re going to
dump Spanish media off their news search. From Richard Gingras,
head of Google News:

This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to
charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest
snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As
Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising
on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it’s
with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes
into effect in January) we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google
News, and close Google News in Spain.

For centuries publishers were limited in how widely they could
distribute the printed page. The Internet changed all that —
creating tremendous opportunities but also real challenges for
publishers as competition both for readers’ attention and for
advertising Euros increased. We’re committed to helping the news
industry meet that challenge and look forward to continuing to work
with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to
help them increase their online readership and revenues.

It means that readers not just in Spain but in other countries
will be unable to use Google News (and possibly other search
service either) to keep track of news coming out of the country.
Intellectual property and Internet law expert David Post wondered

what could happen next in The Volokh Conspiracy blog over at
The Washington Post:

Google’s pullout does not, necessarily, mean that it will avoid
liability in Spain.  One can easily imagine a scenario under
which a Spanish court could say:  Google is still doing
business “in Spain,” because news.google.com (not to mention all
the other Google sites and services) are still accessible to
Internet users in Spain. And what about those Spanish publishers
that don’t get identified as such by Google’s filters – if their
snippets show up on news.google.com, won’t they have a remedy in
Spanish court?  And I’m no expert on the content of Spanish
law, but many copyright laws around the world (including, notably,
our own) protect works, not people – a work written by a
Frenchman and published in Japan gets precisely the same protection
under US law as something I write and publish in Washington DC.
 If Spanish law works that way, then news.google.com is still
infringing even after it removes “Spanish” publications, and it is
doing so “in Spain” (because its sites can be accessed there).
 [If this sounds far-fetched, it’s not – this is precisely the
kind of “extraterritorial application” of law that the
EU, in its official guidelines, has endorsed in regard to the
“right to be forgotten.”]