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Google News to shut down in Spain

googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com

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Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#61

Post by kalleboo »

KobaQ wrote: post #53
jonathansizz wrote: post #2

A pertinent quote from the Guardian article on this story: Germany passed a similar law to Spain’s and Google removed newspapers from Google News in response but in October publishers reached an agreement with the company after traffic to their websites plummeted.

That's exactly how it has to be done. Google can't be allowed to copy the content or parts of it without permission of the creator. We shouldn't forget that they're making huge amounts of money by selling others work here. On the other hand Google claims to create "real value for these publications by driving people to their websites", which is often true in the short run. So the publisher can consider allowing copyi…

> Google can't be allowed to copy the content or parts of it without permission of the creator

Do you also believe Google should remove the excerpts from web sites on search result pages?

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#62

Post by kalleboo »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #30
jessriedel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone comment on the goal behind designing the Spanish law this way? I speculate that they consider Google News to have monopolistic power, so that even if a fair market in snippets would set a finite price Google News would still use its clout to drive that price to zero by removing individual papers who tried to charge. A mandatory price would counter act this, similar to the way that government mandates to p…

I think this would be much more monopolistic if Google charged publishers for the right to be listed in Google News. If Google News was arbitrarily picky about content they listed, that would be akin to censorship.

"censorship" is too strong a word but it would be a barrier to entry to new entrants. Similar situation to the net neutrality debate. News neutrality?

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#63

Post by dyadic »

sounds wrote: post #41
dyadic wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two sides to the scourge. WRT the BBC, they produce quality content, partly funded by us Brits and partly funded by exporting the content to other countries. With the internet they have limited choices: * Keep things off the internet and disappoint everyone * Put things on the global internet and lose export value * Put things on the internet but geolocate to the UK and retain export value Clearly for them,…

So your dilemma could be a false dichotomy if (and I realize it's a big if): * BBC puts things on the global internet * Global users can discover it more readily * BBC becomes well-known as a provider of quality content * Demand for BBC content increases because of the online content already available * BBC can charge more for future content (which it can export first to high-profit-margin channels, then publish onli…

For sure.

Point 3, I think they already have covered. I think it's pretty safe to say that the BBC is a well known and established brand, and also a producer of high quality content.

The best way to look at it now is that they're stuck in a local maxima, they could definitely gain by broadcasting online to the world but it might take some time and will most definitely hit them financially in the short run.

There's also a political aspect wrt the BBC too. They are, as per their mandate, completely politically neutral†. But generally the left side of politics supports continuing the license fee we pay where the right side doesn't. If they should suddenly take a significant drop in revenue and it subsequently does affect what they produce then it also puts them at risk. And the last thing us Brits want to see is our BBC channels filling up with adverts.

Now is an interesting time. For a long time they were a plain old tv broadcaster. Now they're on the internet and broadcasting things there there are people questioning whether they should even be doing that. Eventually I think things will stabilize into some condition, I don't know what but I don't think we are there yet.

† of course, with politics, there are many debates about this

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#64

Post by kyllo »

rsync wrote: post #13

Things are going very badly for a global internet if we are discussing a web site "shutting down in spain". Of course we all know what that means and it seems very sensible in 2014, but remember - if someone had told you in 1998 that a certain website would not be operating in country X, you would have laughed and explained to them (like a child) that the Internet was a single global network and that if one had Inter…

The way I read it, Google didn't say they were blocking IP addresses from Spain, so users in Spain will still be able to access news.google.com, the change is that Google is forced to no longer aggregate news content from Spanish media sites due to the law forcing said media to charge Google for aggregating their content. And Google is taking down their Google News Spain site which specifically aggregates Spanish news.

In other words, it's a completely orthogonal concern to what you are talking about.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#66

Post by KobaQ »

rsync wrote: post #13

Things are going very badly for a global internet if we are discussing a web site "shutting down in spain". Of course we all know what that means and it seems very sensible in 2014, but remember - if someone had told you in 1998 that a certain website would not be operating in country X, you would have laughed and explained to them (like a child) that the Internet was a single global network and that if one had Inter…

It is a long long time ago when Google could be considered innocent (acting ethically). Actually, they're acting the opposite way for ages by ignoring copyright, privacy and by manipulating.

Generally I agree, however. The ethic mostly seems to be gone. And it has to be taken care of by enforcing copyright and privacy protection laws. I had my wake-up moment when Facebook started copying whole Wikipedia articles instead of linking.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#68

Post by onetimeusename »

ryanhuff wrote: post #57
onetimeusename wrote: post #36

I am reading through the official law and essentially it is saying that the Spanish government finds this necessary to reinforce intellectual property protections, the ip here being the news/stories. The thing that isn't clear from the law was whether anyone had actually complained about what Google was doing or whether Google was actually found violating any ip laws in place(it doesn't seem so). The whole thing is 4…

Yes. Newspapers have lobbied the government to impose a "Google Tax". http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/jul/29/goog...

From what I can tell, that seems to sum up the law pretty well.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#70

Post by throwawaytiger »

[deleted] wrote: post #67

[deleted]

Google News does not 'republish the full text of basically every article of basically every newspaper' it actually accommodates paywalls just fine:

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en

also it ain't the reason newspapers aren't making as much money as they'd like to, it's just the most convenient target for the blame.

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