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Comment by jonathansizz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

Wow. I imagine this also affects sites like Topix. What a shame. If one wanted to get news from Spain, or any other country with similar laws, how would one search on a topic, DMOZ?

Google should charge for listing, and it would be a nice coincidence - totally random of course, that the amount they charge is exactly the same as the amount they have to pay.

Kind of like what amazon did when France forced them to charge shipping.

They closed that loophole. Google would have to pay to a third party (equivalent of the American RIAA, essentially), but they would have to charge the individual websites.

Side note: there was no loophole for Amazon and shipping in France, just good PR that made people think there was.

Eh? Explain please.

They made a law of no free shipping, so Amazon charged 0.01 for shipping. Seems like a loophole to me.

France has fixed price for books, with at most a 5% discount from the price fixed by the editor.

For online merchant, the law allowed the 5% discount to apply only on shipping and shipping can't be free.

So it doesn't matter if amazon shipping is 1cts or 1 eur, as long as it costs less than 5% it is free for the customer. But while shipping is still free, they now have to sell more expensive books.

From the point of view of the government the law worked as intended and there is no loophole, amazon and online booksellers just became more expensive than offline shops (since they can have both free shipping and 5% discount).

Personally if find that amazon played very well there, they managed to have the public perceive as a win what was a total loss.

It´s actually no overstatement. The law includes a clause specifically to avoid that, stating that paying the tax is an "inalienable right". Of course, as the law reads, it´s more an obligation that a right... As a spanish citizen, I´m equally ashamed and enraged of this old-fashioned, short-sighted and conservative law.

What makes it conservative? The law seems quite disruptive to me.

It is conservative in that it tries to preserve the current order.

Of course, as with most such conservative stupidities, it fails by not understanding how the current order actually work.

Considering the "current order" is Google News existing and as a result it doesn't anymore, that fits the disruptive tag perfectly.

It wants to go back 10-15 years - not create a new order as is usually implied by the word disruptive. Reactionary might be the best word for it.

For the people making these laws, Google is a disruptive force that menaces the established business models.

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.

To avoid what happened in Germany.

I think this would be much more monopolistic if Google charged publishers for the right to be listed in Google News. If Google News was arbitrarily picky about content they listed, that would be akin to censorship.

"censorship" is too strong a word but it would be a barrier to entry to new entrants. Similar situation to the net neutrality debate. News neutrality?

What is a "fair market in snippets"? I'm having trouble imagining a market of companies bidding on being able to include a sentence from a news article.

This seems much more like the reverse, where indeed the government is trying to prevent individual publishers from benefiting over others by not charging for snippets of their stories, but it seems much more in service of propping up the existing oligopoly of the news world.

I think the goal is to placate local, entrenched media.

Big news companies have complained for years about aggregation yet generally sulked when it's been removed (see Germany).

I believe the goal/logic is "we want money. Google has lots of money, we should try and get some of that"

You also have to consider that the publishing industry is really hurting because of people moving online and the press has a lot of political power.

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.

> Google can't be allowed to copy the content or parts of it without permission of the creator

Do you also believe Google should remove the excerpts from web sites on search result pages?

If it's the substantial part of the content, yes. But in the case of most of the web search results it is not, so no.

However, you've asked the tricky question. Is it necessary to go to the website or to the original news article or not?

That's just my moral based evaluation, I guess from the perspective of a lawyer it's seen differently, much more strictly.

It seems to me if a news article can be summed up in the one-sentence excerpt shown on Google News, I could just get that from Twitter and it has very little value...

Your statement "Google can't be allowed to copy the content or parts of it without permission of the creator" doesn't take into account that "Publishers can choose whether or not they want their articles to appear in Google News" (from the post).

I think I took this into account, but I admit I didn't see something else, which you pointed me to:

>> 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.

In Spain it's not possible for publishers to allow Google to post without payment.

So, yeah, in this case I missed the point ...

And it also doesn't take into account that publishers can use robots.txt to disallow Google News scrapping

> 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

Are you saying that quoting and news aggregation must be illegal without consent?

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