Let's summarize what is happening here:
Big media editors AEDE, most of which pro-government, in collusion with the
corrupt Spanish politicians have managed a masterstroke which they think will:
1. Get them free money
2. Destroy the discoverability of smaller media competitors, usually critical
with the government
3. Hinder the future of Spanish internet tech business, their main competitor
4. Get more exposure, since readers won't have access to media agreggation and
will resort to reading just one or two outlets
In reality, what is likely to happen is:
1. Google will close Google News Spain, no big problem
2. Spanish media aggregators will move their business abroad and won't
contribute taxes to the country
3. Tech enterpreneurs will realize that Spain is a shitty country to invest money on
4. Without Google, the aggregators, and thanks to the increasing
user boycott to AEDE media, those editors will lose traffic and money.
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.
This sounds as though it won't matter if Spanish news aggregators move abroad, because the law applies to the Spanish news sources themselves, not the aggregator. Unless I'm misunderstanding (and maybe I am, so correct me), if a news publisher inside Spain doesn't demand payment from an aggregator located outside Spain, the publisher in Spain gets punished by the Spanish law.
This approach would be a nasty way to do as you said: limit the ability of smaller, alternative news sources, to attract readers. Unless they left Spain, they would not be allowed to volunteer their content to any free aggregator anywhere, and if they DID leave Spain, they would lose the ability to report on local Spanish issues.
Things are going very badly for a global internet if we are discussing a web site "shutting down in spain".
Of course we all know what that means and it seems very sensible in 2014, but remember - if someone had told you in 1998 that a certain website would not be operating in country X, you would have laughed and explained to them (like a child) that the Internet was a single global network and that if one had Internet access at all they would have access to the site in question.
All of that simplicity and innocence has slipped away.
This case is less "Google News is not accessible to people in Spain" and more "Google News can no longer publish content originated in Spain." The effect may be similar because Spaniards often want Spanish content, but what's happening seems different to your characterization.
The way I read it, Google didn't say they were blocking IP addresses from Spain, so users in Spain will still be able to access news.google.com, the change is that Google is forced to no longer aggregate news content from Spanish media sites due to the law forcing said media to charge Google for aggregating their content. And Google is taking down their Google News Spain site which specifically aggregates Spanish news.
In other words, it's a completely orthogonal concern to what you are talking about.
Completely agree with the sad trend. Though to be fair, the scourge of geolocation based blocking started with media companies (mostly American, but also bbc and others) in a bid to recreate the DVD region encoding bullshit on the internet. Add to that the NSA merrily slurping up data from the global firehose... there's no innocence left to corrupt at this point.
I think you have misinterpreted the news. It's not Google News is shutting down in Spain. It's just Google can't no longer link to news stories in Spanish news publishers without paying. Google News can still run fine in Spain, just without the local stories. Presumably global news or Spanish news from other sources can still be viewed in Google News if Google chose not to shut it down.
I am not sure about that. Were any of the AOL sites available in Russia or Japan in 1998?
Also didn't compuserve do the same and block their services from non paying users (which means if your country's credit card is not accepted you are SOL)?
I am under the impression that walled gardens and splitting by countries or networks were also pretty common.
I'm not sure how this totally nonsensical and erroneous reading of the post and subsequent comments have hijacked this thread, so at the risk of being patronizing allow me to explain this as simply as I can:
Spain passed a law that "forces" news publishers to collect a levy from online news aggregators.
Online news aggregators will be fined if they aren't paying the copyright levy (yeah it's that ridiculous).
Nor publishers or aggregators can optout of this arrangement.
Google is stopping the Google News aggregation in Spain. They are NOT GEO-BLOCKING IT.
It is a long long time ago when Google could be considered innocent (acting ethically). Actually, they're acting the opposite way for ages by ignoring copyright, privacy and by manipulating.
Generally I agree, however. The ethic mostly seems to be gone. And it has to be taken care of by enforcing copyright and privacy protection laws. I had my wake-up moment when Facebook started copying whole Wikipedia articles instead of linking.
Articles about this have been going around Spanish news aggregators for a while. Now that there's an official statement from Google, message will finally go around the world showing what kind of stupid laws the Spanish government is passing around with the influence of the powerful copyright lobbies.
Now, about the recent Spanish Intellectual Property reform. The particular reform affecting Google is actually called the AEDE tax. This reform will affect any news aggregator operating in Spain.
AEDE stands for Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles, as in Spanish Association of Newspaper Editors. This private association, together with another one called CEDRO, will take care of collecting this tax. Even if your publication is not associated with AEDE and because this reform is law, they will have the obligation to collect it.
This reform smells exactly the same as an old anti-piracy law. Just change AEDE for SGAE (another association, related to authors and editors). For a while, any kind of media support was subject to this tax. Any media support, including hard drives and even cameras, on the pretense that these might be used to store content subject to IP. This law was derogated on 2011, but not completely. Now it's the state the one who pays this tax to SGAE. I can see this AEDE tax having poor results, and either the public or the state ending up having to pay for it.
Funnily enough, this just shows how weird and different some people think. This tax is proposing that news aggregators cause loss damage to news producers just as torrent aggregators cause damages to Warner. Note that this IP reform also includes fines of around 150k to 600k euros for running a site that links to copyrighted material. Before, it was only an infraction if a site was causing "significant damages". This has been eliminated, as in, any damage is a significant damage.
Just as a remark, let's not confuse this with the so-called "Google Tax", which is related to stopping Google and other big co's from evading taxes in Europe and has nothing to do with intellectual property. To be fair, I do not even know by now, as they call "Google tax" anything that is going to affect Google, nevermind.
Similar (not to that extreme) just happened in Germany during the last 12-24 months.
The conservative party massively expanded the copyright of publishers (German legislation: Leistungsschutzrecht - English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_p... )
and some of the larger publishers then started to demand payments from Google for including snippets in its news services. Google reacted by removing all those publishers from their news indexes and services.
Somewhere down the line even the dumbest of those publishers must have realised (they've been receiving 80%+ of their traffic via Google) that the laws pushed through by their sock puppets in Berlin did not give them the additional extra risk free payments they had expected (for the work of others - in this case Google). Hint to the publishers: Understand how the (distribution) medium works before you write yourself some dreamy business plans.
To my know by now almost all of those publishers have paddled back and have given Google free licenses so that they again will be included in the index - Question: Will they provided the same free licenses to other search engines or web sites? - looks like this should be another example for an overall review of the legality of these publisher friendly regulation vs fair use & censorship. It will then be another change of legislation pushed through for "special interest groups" by the current government and it's last 2 predecessors that has been declared unconstitutional.
This sounds almost exactly what the GEMA is doing in Germany in regards to music.
They get to collect money for songs being made public. Prime example in the digital age is now youtube.
And they also have something called the GEMA assumption. They do not even need to check if the author or general right holders to a particular song are represented by them. They do not even need to check if the song in question is public domain. They can just assume they are responsible and thus make youtube block basically all music on their site proactively. And then, an individual can come forward and proof that a particular song needs to be unblocked cause it is public domain or they hold the rights to it and they are not associated with GEMA to do their bill collecting.
In essence, if I were to write a song, record it and put it on youtube and it gets enough exposure, the GEMA will find it and make youtube to block it because they did not pay the GEMA for this use. Even though I am not a member of GEMA and have never told them to be my intellectual property rights enforcer.
A pertinent quote from the Guardian article on this story:
Germany passed a similar law to Spain’s and Google removed newspapers from Google News in response but in October publishers reached an agreement with the company after traffic to their websites plummeted.
Seems like the difference is they can't come to an agreement with publishers this time: "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"
(though of course they may be overstating the requirement)
Can someone comment on the goal behind designing the Spanish law this way?
I speculate that they consider Google News to have monopolistic power, so that even if a fair market in snippets would set a finite price Google News would still use its clout to drive that price to zero by removing individual papers who tried to charge. A mandatory price would counter act this, similar to the way that government mandates to publish open access give bargaining power to the researchers over oligopolies like Nature and Science.
That's exactly how it has to be done. Google can't be allowed to copy the content or parts of it without permission of the creator. We shouldn't forget that they're making huge amounts of money by selling others work here. On the other hand Google claims to create "real value for these publications by driving people to their websites", which is often true in the short run. So the publisher can consider allowing copying parts of their articles. And Google could even consider charging them for this service.
I am reading through the official law and essentially it is saying that the Spanish government finds this necessary to reinforce intellectual property protections, the ip here being the news/stories. The thing that isn't clear from the law was whether anyone had actually complained about what Google was doing or whether Google was actually found violating any ip laws in place(it doesn't seem so). The whole thing is 40 pages so I probably won't read it all. Can anyone clarify if there had been some sort of issue here?
edit: Something that sticks out is that the law dictates how any agreement involving ip is to be done even if previous agreements are in place in order to cover costs "equitably". Yet I can't see how Google isn't already beneficial. The wording suggests Google would be causing damages since damages can be included in payments under this law.
Things are getting pretty freaky around here in Spain. We've got some horrible (freedom-wise) laws passed recently and we're all angry about them. They've been trying to for several years, and now that people is tired of fighting these stupid laws back they can pass them. This basically means that Google would need to pay to index newspapers.
As an American I watch Europe pretty closely, and I've seen some things that are worrisome such as increasing amounts of fascism (anti-freedom / anti-privacy)... but, things seem to be getting pretty freaky almost everywhere, freedom seems to be on the retreat globally.
For Spain, speaking sociologically, how long can an advanced country have 30%-35% real unemployment, before there are severely destabilizing effects that tumble out of that (culturally, politically and so on). Greece is facing a similar context and similar extreme unemployment problems. I would think it dramatically increases the risk of getting dangerous politicians that start making fantastical promises, with voters increasingly willing to buy into them.
There has been a near total collapse across Europe of the system of promises that were made, that support the premise of the modern welfare state. Only a few countries have been spared (either partially or totally), such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc. France's economy for example is smaller than it was in 2004 inflation adjusted. GDP for the whole of Europe is still below 2007 levels. Even Finland's per capita GDP hasn't increased since 1990 inflation adjusted. How long can such stagnation continue before there are severe consequences.
TL;DR: 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.
Why can't the just display the headline and no snippet from the article text? Or does that count as a snippet? But wait... what about the actual organic search results? Do they have to remove Spanish news articles from that too?
There's no consistency or reason to be found in this, the approach is insanity. What they'll end up doing is jumping from one hot stove to another to another, policy is being made up as they go along based on consequences and political pull.
This is one example of what happens when the population gives absolute power to a single political party: lobbying paradise. We spaniards have the politicians we deserve.
The similar "Sinde Law", that penalized P2P file-sharing, was approved with the votes of both PSOE (then in Government) and PP, the two main political parties.
To be honest, I didn't see who could benefit from this law enforcement. If the government or whoever drive this believe this would force Google to pay for the news, they are wrong in the first place. The reason is simple, if Google pays to Spain, other countries would certainly require it to do the same, otherwise, why not? So if they are not stupid, the shutdown is what they have foreseen.
If that is the case, big local newpaper/portal will be happy. Because right now, there will be more people to buy the real newspaper/visit their site directly. Maybe they will see to a certain increase in their readership. However, the trend of information digitization is inevitable. Fundamentally ,internet is more efficient in collecting, organizing and delivering information than any other media. Eventually everyone will become loser.
I don't know how this is going to end, because law is not something that could be taken back easily. Hopefully, they will be smart enough to figure out something to bypass it.
Interestingly enough, I found myself searching through news.google.es and using google translate to navigate the local news about impending shutdown of itself. Pure irony.
This reminds me the situation is actually bilateral. Unlike the precedent cases, it will block NOT ONLY Spain but also the WHOLE WORLD to access to a lot of Spanish content. In effect, this is, IMHO, even worse than China's infamous Great Firewall, which is evil but not stopping google to index local articles.
This is not against Google in particular, is against a tool that helped people to find news in alternative media and gave visibility to small news sites.
This law is a victory for the big News Editors that are controlled by Government and economic powers in Spain
It was really funny when they published an article in El Pais comparing news aggregators with piracy and you could see the social sharing buttons next to it including those news aggregators they hated so much.
I do think this is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Why couldn't google exclude Spanish news sources from google News?
If I were running Google (which obviously I'm not, and probably for good reason as what I'm about to say might indicate), I would use the companies enormous amount of capital to exclude all major Spanish news outlets and pay the the independent and fringe new outlets what the law demands as an F.U. to the AEDE. But that's just me.
I understand that politics isn't Google's business, but Google (and the Internet) is fast becoming every Politician's business; And I mean "business" as in a way for them to make money for themselves. So like it or not, Google is going to get embroiled in politics. It would be prudent to nip this sort of stuff in the bud, and make a lot of noise while they're doing it.
So how is what google news is doing not piracy? I mean, we also have Peter Sunde's post about his ideals on the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734204 and a large portion of comments seem to be very pro-copyright. How come then, that nobody here is applauding this move? Google news is absolutely breaking copyright - they're publishing others' content without their permission and without paying them. Under any measure what they do is illegal. Why then, is everyone siding with Google news on this? This legislation simply extends compulsory licensing to news publications.
Mainly because your comment: "...they're publishing others' content without their permission and without paying them." is false. The publications can choose to add or remove themselves from google news, meaning google has permission. Also because google news points to the publications and does not re-publish in whole.
I feel embarrassed of my government, they are so ridiculous, they fell so big headed that it is very good that google does these things to show them how foolish they are
[+] [-] carlesfe|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SiVal|11 years ago|reply
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.
This sounds as though it won't matter if Spanish news aggregators move abroad, because the law applies to the Spanish news sources themselves, not the aggregator. Unless I'm misunderstanding (and maybe I am, so correct me), if a news publisher inside Spain doesn't demand payment from an aggregator located outside Spain, the publisher in Spain gets punished by the Spanish law.
This approach would be a nasty way to do as you said: limit the ability of smaller, alternative news sources, to attract readers. Unless they left Spain, they would not be allowed to volunteer their content to any free aggregator anywhere, and if they DID leave Spain, they would lose the ability to report on local Spanish issues.
[+] [-] mobiplayer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|11 years ago|reply
Of course we all know what that means and it seems very sensible in 2014, but remember - if someone had told you in 1998 that a certain website would not be operating in country X, you would have laughed and explained to them (like a child) that the Internet was a single global network and that if one had Internet access at all they would have access to the site in question.
All of that simplicity and innocence has slipped away.
[+] [-] raldi|11 years ago|reply
The actual story is, "The 'Spain' version of Google News won't be accessible to anyone."
[+] [-] jzwinck|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyllo|11 years ago|reply
In other words, it's a completely orthogonal concern to what you are talking about.
[+] [-] chetanahuja|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgbrenner|11 years ago|reply
It seems reasonable that Google should comply with the laws of where they do business.
[+] [-] ww520|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrktb|11 years ago|reply
I am under the impression that walled gardens and splitting by countries or networks were also pretty common.
[+] [-] blueskin_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaytiger|11 years ago|reply
Spain passed a law that "forces" news publishers to collect a levy from online news aggregators.
Online news aggregators will be fined if they aren't paying the copyright levy (yeah it's that ridiculous).
Nor publishers or aggregators can optout of this arrangement.
Google is stopping the Google News aggregation in Spain. They are NOT GEO-BLOCKING IT.
[+] [-] KobaQ|11 years ago|reply
Generally I agree, however. The ethic mostly seems to be gone. And it has to be taken care of by enforcing copyright and privacy protection laws. I had my wake-up moment when Facebook started copying whole Wikipedia articles instead of linking.
[+] [-] kh_hk|11 years ago|reply
Articles about this have been going around Spanish news aggregators for a while. Now that there's an official statement from Google, message will finally go around the world showing what kind of stupid laws the Spanish government is passing around with the influence of the powerful copyright lobbies.
Now, about the recent Spanish Intellectual Property reform. The particular reform affecting Google is actually called the AEDE tax. This reform will affect any news aggregator operating in Spain.
AEDE stands for Asociación de Editores de Diarios Españoles, as in Spanish Association of Newspaper Editors. This private association, together with another one called CEDRO, will take care of collecting this tax. Even if your publication is not associated with AEDE and because this reform is law, they will have the obligation to collect it.
This reform smells exactly the same as an old anti-piracy law. Just change AEDE for SGAE (another association, related to authors and editors). For a while, any kind of media support was subject to this tax. Any media support, including hard drives and even cameras, on the pretense that these might be used to store content subject to IP. This law was derogated on 2011, but not completely. Now it's the state the one who pays this tax to SGAE. I can see this AEDE tax having poor results, and either the public or the state ending up having to pay for it.
Funnily enough, this just shows how weird and different some people think. This tax is proposing that news aggregators cause loss damage to news producers just as torrent aggregators cause damages to Warner. Note that this IP reform also includes fines of around 150k to 600k euros for running a site that links to copyrighted material. Before, it was only an infraction if a site was causing "significant damages". This has been eliminated, as in, any damage is a significant damage.
Just as a remark, let's not confuse this with the so-called "Google Tax", which is related to stopping Google and other big co's from evading taxes in Europe and has nothing to do with intellectual property. To be fair, I do not even know by now, as they call "Google tax" anything that is going to affect Google, nevermind.
[+] [-] fpp|11 years ago|reply
The conservative party massively expanded the copyright of publishers (German legislation: Leistungsschutzrecht - English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_p... ) and some of the larger publishers then started to demand payments from Google for including snippets in its news services. Google reacted by removing all those publishers from their news indexes and services.
Somewhere down the line even the dumbest of those publishers must have realised (they've been receiving 80%+ of their traffic via Google) that the laws pushed through by their sock puppets in Berlin did not give them the additional extra risk free payments they had expected (for the work of others - in this case Google). Hint to the publishers: Understand how the (distribution) medium works before you write yourself some dreamy business plans.
To my know by now almost all of those publishers have paddled back and have given Google free licenses so that they again will be included in the index - Question: Will they provided the same free licenses to other search engines or web sites? - looks like this should be another example for an overall review of the legality of these publisher friendly regulation vs fair use & censorship. It will then be another change of legislation pushed through for "special interest groups" by the current government and it's last 2 predecessors that has been declared unconstitutional.
The latest step in this play was the EU Parliament vote on breaking up Google (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/27/european-p...) - I wonder who paid for that vote.
[+] [-] yaeger|11 years ago|reply
In essence, if I were to write a song, record it and put it on youtube and it gets enough exposure, the GEMA will find it and make youtube to block it because they did not pay the GEMA for this use. Even though I am not a member of GEMA and have never told them to be my intellectual property rights enforcer.
[+] [-] pmontra|11 years ago|reply
This is to show how unreasonable that law is if it's really as general as it looks.
[+] [-] jonathansizz|11 years ago|reply
Germany passed a similar law to Spain’s and Google removed newspapers from Google News in response but in October publishers reached an agreement with the company after traffic to their websites plummeted.
[+] [-] magicalist|11 years ago|reply
(though of course they may be overstating the requirement)
[+] [-] jessriedel|11 years ago|reply
I speculate that they consider Google News to have monopolistic power, so that even if a fair market in snippets would set a finite price Google News would still use its clout to drive that price to zero by removing individual papers who tried to charge. A mandatory price would counter act this, similar to the way that government mandates to publish open access give bargaining power to the researchers over oligopolies like Nature and Science.
[+] [-] KobaQ|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetimeusename|11 years ago|reply
edit: Something that sticks out is that the law dictates how any agreement involving ip is to be done even if previous agreements are in place in order to cover costs "equitably". Yet I can't see how Google isn't already beneficial. The wording suggests Google would be causing damages since damages can be included in payments under this law.
[+] [-] ryanhuff|11 years ago|reply
http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jul/29/goog...
[+] [-] franciscop|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|11 years ago|reply
For Spain, speaking sociologically, how long can an advanced country have 30%-35% real unemployment, before there are severely destabilizing effects that tumble out of that (culturally, politically and so on). Greece is facing a similar context and similar extreme unemployment problems. I would think it dramatically increases the risk of getting dangerous politicians that start making fantastical promises, with voters increasingly willing to buy into them.
There has been a near total collapse across Europe of the system of promises that were made, that support the premise of the modern welfare state. Only a few countries have been spared (either partially or totally), such as Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc. France's economy for example is smaller than it was in 2004 inflation adjusted. GDP for the whole of Europe is still below 2007 levels. Even Finland's per capita GDP hasn't increased since 1990 inflation adjusted. How long can such stagnation continue before there are severe consequences.
[+] [-] jpatokal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AznHisoka|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etanol|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gasull|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mimighost|11 years ago|reply
If that is the case, big local newpaper/portal will be happy. Because right now, there will be more people to buy the real newspaper/visit their site directly. Maybe they will see to a certain increase in their readership. However, the trend of information digitization is inevitable. Fundamentally ,internet is more efficient in collecting, organizing and delivering information than any other media. Eventually everyone will become loser.
I don't know how this is going to end, because law is not something that could be taken back easily. Hopefully, they will be smart enough to figure out something to bypass it.
[+] [-] eva1984|11 years ago|reply
This reminds me the situation is actually bilateral. Unlike the precedent cases, it will block NOT ONLY Spain but also the WHOLE WORLD to access to a lot of Spanish content. In effect, this is, IMHO, even worse than China's infamous Great Firewall, which is evil but not stopping google to index local articles.
[+] [-] 6t6t6|11 years ago|reply
This is not against Google in particular, is against a tool that helped people to find news in alternative media and gave visibility to small news sites.
This law is a victory for the big News Editors that are controlled by Government and economic powers in Spain
[+] [-] santialbo|11 years ago|reply
Like we say here, con dos cojones.
[+] [-] sebicas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gasull|11 years ago|reply
http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2014/12/10/actualidad/14...
[+] [-] gasull|11 years ago|reply
http://boingboing.net/2014/07/28/spain-pushes-for-google-tax...
Just like we have the term 'patent troll', maybe we need the term 'tax troll' for some Governments.
[+] [-] Maken|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vixen99|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomelders|11 years ago|reply
If I were running Google (which obviously I'm not, and probably for good reason as what I'm about to say might indicate), I would use the companies enormous amount of capital to exclude all major Spanish news outlets and pay the the independent and fringe new outlets what the law demands as an F.U. to the AEDE. But that's just me.
I understand that politics isn't Google's business, but Google (and the Internet) is fast becoming every Politician's business; And I mean "business" as in a way for them to make money for themselves. So like it or not, Google is going to get embroiled in politics. It would be prudent to nip this sort of stuff in the bud, and make a lot of noise while they're doing it.
[+] [-] anon4|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrayr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blas01blas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logicalman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Raticide|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taksintik|11 years ago|reply