In The Contest Of Spain Vs. Google, Who Do You Think Will Win?

Photo Credit: Enrique Dans at Creative Commons

Starving artists and copyright holders rejoice?

Spain passed a new intellectual property law on October 30 that would require news aggregators such as Google News, Reddit and Digg to pay a fee for each article they link to.

Popularly known as the “Google tax,” the purpose of the new law is to protect Spain’s print media industry.

Publishers accuse Google of being a parasite that uses others’ content to attract advertising without spending a penny on content themselves. Google counters that it helps newspapers by bringing traffic to their websites.

Google has said it is “disappointed” with Spain’s new law. “We believe that services like Google News help publishers bring traffic to their sites. As far as the future is concerned, we will continue working with the Spanish publishers to help increase their revenues while we evaluate our options within the framework of the new legislation.”

Potentially, any website could be forced to pay a fee for “listing a link and a meaningful description” of an article, according to the law. Lawmakers have said, however, that it will not apply to users of social sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Why this law will not work

Even critics sympathetic to the plight of journalists think there are two problems with this law. First, it is hard to enforce. What will count as fair use and copyright infringement, and does Spain have the resources to police the entire (Spanish language) Internet? Also, why would Google have to pay a fee but not Facebook?

Second, it seems likely that Google will just repeat what they did in Germany. When Germany passed a similar law requiring Google to pay a fee to publishers, Google simply excluded those publishers from their news feed. Instead of sticking to their guns, German publishers soon came back and begged Google to reinstate them.

After a few days, my guess is that the Spanish media will come running back to Google with their tails between their legs.

We’ll see what happens, but in the battle between the entire country of Spain and Google, my bets are on Google. And Google doesn’t even have an army.