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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

In Germany all major publisher, including those that fought to get a similar law, signed contracts with Google allowing them to index without pay. All small aggregators and search engines still have to pay so the end result is that Google News Germany is more powerful than before. I expect something similar in Spain.

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Yup, exactly. The only reason it didn't happen in Spain right away is the "inalienable right" clause, so that publisher's couldn't sign away the right to be paid. If that goes away, it'll be the same situation as Germany.

Good, it's even better

Now those imbeciles realize they shot themselves in the foot?

If they want Google to stay they should pay them. It's that simple

They probably thought the clause would force unity.

I'm guessing they analyzed the German situation as a failure of unity: some publishers "sold out" and signed no-money agreements with Google, which weakened the position of the holdouts. They -- possibly the same group of publishers lobbying for the German law -- presumably thought that if they forced unity, then Google would be forced to pay up rather than walk away.

This seems like a bizarre law. I assume that it only applies to news publishers, so that you can still publish open-source software or put CC licences on your own photos without needing to demand payment?

I haven't read the law itself, but I assume it only applies to news publishing. Simply banning the right to give your content out for free would be extremely broad and overly stupid for any government to do legally.

Do we have any insight into why they made an exception for Google? The obvious starting point is Google threatening to stop search indexing sites they can't use in Google news - there might even be technical justification for that. But presumably the publishers would attack that as abusing a monopoly position, it seems pretty much textbook definition. They must have known signing with Google while that law existed would only make Google stronger like you said - so it'd be interesting to know why they'd do that.

Shareholders. The traffic to their websites dropped so massively they would have killed their own business. Took less than a month. So the same guy (CEO I think) who bashed against Google at any occasion had to get it settled or risk his own job.

Fair enough! You'd think they might check how much traffic Google news was sending them before ranting and lobbying for that law.

Google News drives sufficient traffic to make it worth it. Springer tried to not give google the license and some numbers were mentioned in that context, but I'm to lazy to ddg them. The losses were substantial.

What do you do if the news organizations seem to have less integrity left than Google. It's a shameful display of German "journalism". Everyone in that lobby should just quit. Go to Pluto, go suck somewhere else at your "job".

I am angry and ashamed at the newspapers of my country.

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