Spanish Copyright Amendments Will Shakedown News Sites and Censor the WebJeremy Malcolm A second way that industries can respond to technological change is by suing those whom they see as responsible for disrupting their old business models, or by lobbying for new protectionist laws to prop them up in a quixotic attempt to hold back the technological tide. Examples of this second approach to change include the music industrys ill-fated war on peer-to-peer file sharing, and lobbying by taxi cartels for new laws to make it impossible for ride-sharing companies to compete with them. Guess which of these options European news publishers have taken? The Google Tax Weve reported before on how news publishers in Germany and Ireland have demanded that Google pay royalties for the reproduction of news snippets and image thumbnails next to search results in its Google News product. In France and Belgium publishers took this claim to the courts resulting in an eventual settlement from Google, whilst in Germany, lawmakers unwisely caved in and passed legislation in 2013 to grant the special copyright-like rights in news snippets that the publishers had demanded. Illustrating how pointless this was, Google subsequently called the bluff of the German publishers, replacing their news snippets with simple hyperlinked headings rather than paying the royalties the publishers demanded, while the befuddled publishers watched their traffic stats drop away. In a humiliating backdown reported this week, the publishers have since gone back cap in hand to Google begging it to reindex their content, snippets and all. Last week, Spain passed a similar amendment to its own copyright law, but with a nasty twistnot only are news aggregators prohibited from including news snippets without payment, but this right to payment is made inalienable. This means that aggregators are prohibited from negotiating with the publishers to waive the payment, as has occurred elsewhere in Europe. This would also seemingly frustrate the intent of any news publisher who released their work under a Creative Commons or other open license for royalty-free use. The same new Spanish law (here in PDF) makes other adverse and short-sighted changes to copyright law, bowing to the lobbying pressure of large content owners. The law also newly targets businesses advertising on such websites, as well as those providing it with payment services, and authorizes the Spanish domain authority to cancel any .es domains under which they are hosted. (It is a shame that the Spanish legislators apparently think so little of Google News, because otherwise they might have read news snippets about a pair of ill-fated 2011 bills titled SOPA and PIPA that included similar Internet censorship provisions.) In combination, these provisions will seriously chill speech online, casting a potential cloud of liability over website operators and the intermediaries who serve them. Rather than reducing the dissemination of copyright-infringing content, its only likely effect will be to drive Spanish websites offshore to a less hostile legal environment. Unfortunately, its likely too late now to do much about this ill-considered lawit is already scheduled to take effect in January 2015. This is particularly poorly timed, since the European Commission is in the midst of composing a new Directive to modernize European copyright law, which is likely to be passed in that same year. Whilst the new Directive may (we can only hope) include liberalized copyright limitations and exceptions, Spains amendments to its copyright law go in precisely the opposite direction. There is no doubt that technological change has hit newspaper publishers as well as other copyright owners. But a backward-looking law that penalizes innovators and threatens free speech on the Internet is not the solution. Related selfnews Post Article: Please visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where this first appeared, for the latest in digital privacy and civil liberties. 