The Spanish Government has proposed a new regulation that allows news media firms within the country to ask search engines, including Google, to pay for displaying copyrighted content.
Echoing similar moves across Europe, publishers in Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany have already proposed payment for links, snippets, headlines and lead paragraphs that are being displayed in news search engines and aggregators including Google News and Yahoo news.
According to Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria the new regulation had been launched in the draft of an intellectual property law, which would be presented to parliament for approval by the People’s Party government, Reuters reported.
As per the newly proposed changes, the search engines may not seek publisher permission to add short fragments while have to pay an equitable remuneration for using them.
However, details about which fragments have to be paid for and how the amount would be analysed, still unclear.
The latest proposal has also been admired by the Association of Spanish Newspaper Editors (AEDE).
Spanish media business had been hit hard by a long-lasting economic recession mainly due to drop in ad spending, leading top shutting down of dozens of newspapers and other media.
