Comment by kh_hk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kh_hk | Hacker News Reader

"the worse the better", I am happy about this.

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.

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.

So it seems the problem with the German law was that they created a basic prisoner's dilemma kind of situation. Publishers who tried to get some compensation from Google for appropriating the fruits of their labor were thwarted by defection from those who didn't. It seems the Spanish law was drafted in recognition of this game theoretic problem. If traffic drops for Spanish publishers turn out to remain well below those seen by the Germans, this could become a model for other countries.

The problem is google news could link to news sites outside of Germany so there were already a large number of 'defectors'. The same thing applies to Spanish media.

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.

This is incorrect. YouTube were a bit naughty in blaming GEMA when the issue is that the two sides have not agreed on a price. Gema is asking for too much, but they are not specifically blocking the content. Google preemptively blocks anything that might be GEMA to avoid being retroactively assessed billions of euros in some future decision.

Performance royalties for music are quite standard, this is one of the primary business models for music. Broadcasters earn money through advertising and pay content producers for the use of the content.

The Spanish news situation is different, since these are just search results excerpts leading directly to the news website.

Oh, you're almost right. What you're describing has been happening in Spain for years with a blank media tax called "canon”, and more recently (2007) with its last iteration as "digital canon": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociedad_General_de_Autores_y_E...

In the case of the digital canon the organization behind it (SGAE) had eight members (including the president) arrested and charged with embezzlement (87 million euros from 1997 to 2011).

I wouldn't be surprised if anything like that happened with this new AEDE tax. Just give them time!

My other comment has been down voted, but let me reiterate that you are factually incorrect. Its not a matter of opinion.

> 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.

Completely and utterly false.

And it is false because?

because GEMA does not find it and block it, YouTube blocks it themselves because they do not have a legal agreement since 2009.

its also false because it has nothing to do with popularity. I've seen very small artists getting blocked here because youtube has data identifying them as a member of any PRO (Performance Rights Organization) that has an agreement with GEMA to get money collected in Germany and then forwarded to the PRO in the home country of the artist.

members of other PROs or anybody that does not sign on to a PRO are unaffected.

I detest GEMA and have protested in the streets against them, but the statement above is false.

I bet that google.com will still be visible in Spain. Search results include links to copyrighted material: web sites like elpais.com which id © EDICIONES EL PAÍS S.L. and a zillion others all around the world. Is Google removing this'd sites from the index for searches originating from Spain or it will pay the fine?

This is to show how unreasonable that law is if it's really as general as it looks.

I guess the only way to account for such a convoluted and inexact law is by taxing Internet usage through ISPs. In fact, I think we should stop calling these taxes, when these are going to the private hands of shell associations.

One of the regions in Spain, Catalonia, will start taxing ISPs next year.

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