Today, Google has announced that it will be permanently shutting down the Spanish version of Google News, effective from December 16, 2014. The shutdown comes in direct response to amendments to the Spanish intellectual property law (Ley De Propiedad Intelectual) imposing a compulsory fee for the use of snippets of text to link to news articles, by online news aggregators that provide a search service.
A similar fee was first introduced in German law in 2013, where it was described as an “ancillary copyright” (or Leistungsschutzrecht). But the fee actually has no heritage in copyright law, which preserves the right to make quotations without remuneration under international law (in fact, it is the only such mandatory limitation to copyright). The German law has been a manifest failure, where publishers willingly forfeited their right to payment from Google, as soon as they realized how much traffic they would lose from not being indexed on Google News.
Spain decided to one-up Germany by making the right to payment inalienable, so that even the news organization quoted is not permitted to waive it. The shuttering of Google News was therefore predictable, and it is hard to see what value this has achieved for the press in Spain or for Spanish (and Spanish speaking) Internet users. Time will tell whether Yahoo News will follow suit—since Yahoo, unlike Google, does monetize its news service with ads.
Are these laws just a big stick for European countries to use against large US tech companies? Certainly, that is part of the motivation; authorities are concerned that US-based tech companies are profiting from European data without paying their fair share of tax on the revenue earned. But if that was all this was about, there would be much more direct ways of addressing it than by passing special-interest amendments to copyright law to benefit press publishers.
What concerns EFF more is that these ancillary copyright laws form part of a broader trend of derogation from the right to link. This can be seen when you examine the other parts of the Spanish copyright amendments that take effect in January (here in PDF)—notably placing criminal liability on website operators who refuse to remove mere links to copyright-infringing material.
This year's European Court of Justice ruling against Google Spain on the so-called Right to be Forgotten, is part of the same larger trend, in requiring search engines to remove links to content judged to be “irrelevant”, even if the content is true. We are also disturbed by comments made by new European Digital Commissioner Günther Oettinger who has foreshadowed [German] a broader roll-out of ancillary copyright rules throughout the EU.
Online intermediaries may be a convenient scapegoat for the fading fortunes of European newspaper publishers, but banning the use of text snippets alongside website links is a misguided and—now self-evidently —counter-productive approach. Once it becomes illegal for aggregators to freely link news summaries to publicly-available websites, it becomes that much easier for those who want to prohibit other sorts of links, such as links to political YouTube videos, to make their case.
The chickens have already begun to come home to roost for Spain with the withdrawal of Google News, and this should sound alarm bells for the Commissioner and for other European countries considering similar measures. It's time for Europe to turn back from this misguided path of Internet content regulation before more damage to the open Internet is done.
Logo da Google News.


Ficheiro:Flag_of_Spain.svg|thumb|left|Bandeira da Espanha.
Em seu blog, a empresa multinacional americana especializada em serviços e produtos relacionados com a internet, Google, anunciou que vai fechar a versão espanhola do Google News, efetivado a partir de 16 de dezembro deste ano. O fechamento foi uma resposta direta às alterações à Lei de Propriedade Intelectual espanhol (''Ley de Propiedad Intelectual'') impondo a taxa obrigatória para a utilização de trechos de texto para conectar-se a artigos de notícias, por agregadores de notícias online que oferecem um serviço de busca.

A lei de propriedade intelectual espanhol passou ao Senado em 15 de outubro e passou pelo Congresso em 30 de outubro (que foram aprovadas) e entrará em vigor a partir de janeiro de 2015. Espanha fez o inalienável direito ao pagamento, de modo que mesmo a organização de notícias citada não é permitida a dispensá-lo. Google News não exibiu anúncios no seu serviço de notícias, por isso não lucrar diretamente e disse que continua a executar o serviço não seria sustentável.

A taxa semelhante havia sido introduzido pela primeira vez no direito alemão, em 2013, onde foi descrito como um "" (''Leistungsschutzrecht''). O ''copyright'' (direito autoral) internacional de lei autoral preserva o direito de fazer citações sem remuneração, o único tal limitação obrigatória aos direitos de autor. Na Alemanha, os editores de bom grado perderam o direito ao pagamento do Google, dada a quantidade de tráfego que perderiam de não ser indexado no Google News.

A  (EFF) tinha expressado preocupação de que "essas leis de direitos autorais auxiliares fazem parte de uma tendência mais ampla de derrogação ao direito de ligar." Eles continuaram, "Isto pode ser visto quando você examinar as outras partes das alterações de direitos autorais espanhóis que entram em vigor em janeiro .... Nomeadamente colocando a responsabilidade criminal em que operadores de sites que se recusam a remover meros links para material que viole direitos autorais" EFF citou a recente introdução do chamado "" legislação que permite a remoção de entradas dos resultados de pesquisa na web do Google.