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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, Google is subject to this law because Google operates and has offices in Spain.

It seems reasonable that Google should comply with the laws of where they do business.

But the law itself does not seem reasonable. It's a violation of fair use.

Lest we forget, Google News links to the articles themselves. It provides a service to news organisations, for—as far as I'm aware—free.

Fair use is an american thing. Spain cannot violate US copyright law

Not exactly; the concept of fair use exists in the Berne convention, it's not just an American thing. Unfortunately, the convention only allows countries to establish fair use, it doesn't mandate it.

> It's a violation of fair use.

welcome to the EU.

just to warn you, you might find yourself laughing at their patent law, should you read it and applicable case laws

Case law in EU? Only within the former empire, and significant parts of that pretend to be on the way out.

there's been a few patent rulings that are [pretty wtf] contradictory to what the written law states

I follow US patent law and cases quite a bit, but not so much the EU. Could you provide a few examples?

try "criticism of EU patent law"

I can't find the original article. It was pretty silly, around 2008 or 2009, the court ruled something basically opposite to the written intent.

I think it had to do with a really low barrier to prior-art-baseed-invalidation, but that might have been another weakness

The other difference is that common law cares for the written intent, while under civil law judges should seek the underlying intent - which can be opposite to what is written down.

One recurring examples I've seen in German law training (but IANAL): two parties agree on the sale of a certain type of fish but use the wrong (Norwegian?) word in the contract. What fish is this contract about? Correct answer: What they meant, not what they wrote down.

This might (or might not) be different in common law - but obviously still isn't an issue unless one party brings the contract in front of a judge.

As for articles about legal cases: Highly popular cases typically make more sense when you dig into the details (eg. reading the actual decision, not just what some journalist misunderstood the court's abstract to be about). Sometimes they remain puzzling - but I fear that's a feature of all legal systems.

And then there's the additional complication that patent cases seem to run under ever-so-slightly different rules to ordinary civil cases, no matter where.

Europe has a stronger copyright which has actually proven a bit more sane than our software patent woes; both granting more protection than copyright but less than an algorithm patent.

Uh ? Fair use is (part of) a law. Laws are not subject to fair use. You are subject to laws, and yes, this changes some aspects of the legal concept that is called fair use (quotation rights), and that simply changes fair use.

Quoting Spanish news sources should no longer be considered fair use inside of Spain.

> Laws are not subject to fair use.

Laws can be subject to other laws (and judicial review). But yeah, fair use is an American Thing.

The doctrine of fair dealing, which is similar but more restrictive than fair use, exists in several Commonwealth countries: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are the ones I know of.

And they are. But will this have the effects the legislators tried to impose. This doesn't get google, it hurts Spain.

I hate to break it to you, but Google are not the only game in town. There are plenty of news aggregators (that generate revenue e.g., from advertising), and plenty of places that would be only too happy to step in and be the news-site-of-choice for the customers Google is leaving. Google departing the market will not "hurt Spain" in any meaningful way.

> There are plenty of news aggregators (that generate revenue e.g., from advertising), and plenty of places that would be only too happy to step in and be the news-site-of-choice for the customers Google is leaving.

The consensus in Spain is that this law is very bad for ALL of the aggregators

Of course, there are famous Spanish news aggregators like Menéame, which unlike Google can't abandon the boat and are already considering closing the website or banning any local news source. The "tax" imposed by this law is too big for making any aggregator profitable, and like other similar Spanish "taxes" managed by private entities, the law is so ambigous that you can't even expect to be fined nly once.

Isn't it reasonable that Google decides to stop operations if it doesn't make business sense?

Right, and they are not going to be doing business in Spain.

What? Where did you get that. Google news is shutting down. Google is not, and I've heard of no plans to close their Madrid office.

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