EmailTraditional mainstream publishers in Spain believe they have found a way to extract payment for the appropriation of their online content.
It follows the Spanish congress's passing of a law last week nicknamed tasa Google ("Google tax") which gives newspaper publishers the right to seek payment from any site that links to their content.
The law, called Canon AEDE, will need to be ratified by the senate in September. If it clears that hurdle, it has the potential to be disruptive for search engines such as Google and sites like Digg and Reddit.
There are several questions to be solved, as a posting on Quartz points out:
"How much compensation is due per link? Who arbitrates in the event of a dispute? And in a world where every news outlet writes the same story, what is exclusive content?"
Techdirt is unimpressed, arguing that it demonstrates "the vast hypocrisy" of newspapers that "know they need to be in Google News because of all the traffic it drives, but they also demand to be paid for it."
Google has criticised the same hypocrisy by pointing out that publishers can remove themselves from search results any time they like. (Every website has a file called robots.txt that can instruct search engines not to index it).
But publishers don't do that because, without Google's links, they would lose a huge number of readers.
Of course, Spain isn't the first European country to try to force Google to pay them. Germany passed a similar law last year. Belgium also took on Google over copyright issues.
Sources: Quartz/Business Insider/Techdirt
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