Spain tries to enforce its own Google tax for news exerpts

[Teelie]

Country by country, Europe falls in and out of love with a “Google tax”

I wasn't sure where to put this, it has elements of stupidity, abuse, weirdness and absurdity in it. So this gets its own thread.

The gist of it is that several news sites want to have Google pay them money to show snippets of news articles in search results or get sued for "piracy". Germany, Belgium and now Spain are all trying to levy a tax against search results that give a snippet of information from these sites.

What prompted me to post this is where Google stopped doing this and those very same sites (ones in Germany) called it blackmail because Google stopped listing them in search results.

In other words they wanted Google to not only show their pages in search results, but pay those sites for doing so.

Spain passed a new Intellectual Property Law yesterday, which includes a provision to levy fees on search engines that show snippets of other webpages. It's at least the third instance of a European government seeking to impose a fee on search techniques to support their traditional publishing industry. Such efforts are often labeled a "Google tax."

"We are disappointed with the new law because we believe that services like Google News help publishers bring traffic to their sites," Google told The Hollywood Reporter in a statement. "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."

The Spanish law allows for sanctions of up to $758,000 for those who violate the law. The penalty applies to anyone who "links to pirated content," according to THR, and in the Spanish view, that apparently includes Google News snippets.

The Spanish effort to impose its own "Google tax" comes just days after a German attempt fell apart. In June, several German publishers took legal action seeking an 11 percent cut of gross revenue from Google News. Earlier this month, amid the ongoing legal action, Google moved to stop showing snippets of the newspapers that were challenging it. And... the papers complained, calling it "blackmail" when Google stopped showing the short excerpts. Last week, the publishers finally gave up, with the VG Media group saying they would go ahead and grant Google a "free license."

In 2007, a Belgian press group sought a similar payout; it gave up in 2011.

Ars Technica

EDIT: Can a mod fix the thread title? I somehow excerpted the "c" in excerpts.

 

[Superwoman Prime]

If they needed to bum a few bucks, all they had to do was ask nicely.

 

[TheComicbookKid]

Wait...so they want the search engine to show their URL but not preview what the search engine saw in the article?

 

[jmc]

The easiest way to circumvent paying any sort of tax is for Google to simply not show the content, Google isn't required to show their content in the first place.