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 Internet access at all they would have access to the site in question.
All of that simplicity and innocence has slipped away.
My reading of the analysis floating around is that, been strict with the current text, yes. Both HN and Reddit are covered by the broad definition of the service this law will apply to. Twitter and Facebook could be on the bag too depending on interpretation. The law doesn't seem to consider if the source of the link is human or automatic.
For that very reason many are worried about Menéame fate, a very popular Reddit-like site here in Spain.
Basically it ended with a fine (which seems absurd to me) but that UK guy had to fight for 18 months against a request of extradition to the USA for having created a web site in the UK which (I quote Wikipedia) "did not host any infringing media, but American authorities say it contained indexed links to media hosted on other sites, and defined it as a "linking" website". This looks like Reddit and HN to me.
Even if your country doesn't comply with the request it's not possible to shrug it away unless an agreement is reached, or you have to be careful never to step into a country with extradition agreements with the one that is trying to get you. That is a severe limitation to personal freedom.
Everything falls apart if we start applying everybody's laws to everybody in every country of the world. I'm pretty sure I violated some laws of some countries writing this.
That's not so clear. I don't know the in an outs of this specific law, but for example a gambling site has to comply with Spanish law if it serves to spaniards. No matter where it's legally located. That's why most gambling .coms geo blacklist spanish or redirect them to the spanish law compliant version of their service.
Same with consumer laws, those apply if I buy a product in other country. For example Spanish law says I can get a refund 7 days after the purchase, no reason required.
Yea, doesn't make sense and probably they can't enforce many of these, but that's how they are redacted. I would set the legal team on alert mode if I were Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/Menéame.
The gambling thing is a bit different, normally it's the sites that cooperate like that so that they have a chance to be able to become a licensed provider in that country in the future. It's a strange trend in that industry that also goes counter to various trade agreements, but that's just how it goes. That said countries can also take action locally against foreign entities they believe are breaking their local laws, and go after their local assets, e.g. they could seize their .es domain names or take action against any local office or other assets that they have.
The way discussion on taxation is going globally I wouldn't be surprised if more legislation heads this way, or at the very least a presence test is applied to see if the company has a physical office in country.
And if you are a teacher in the university writing a resume for your students they want you to pay for the right to cite previous work for other poets/scientifics/philosophers in the photocopies that you are giving to them.
And I think Google won't be the only one to retreat here. Facebook have a lot of new aggregation related features, I don't think they will choose to comply. Twitter will also be subjected to this, it is interesting to see now a simple retweet might be in fringe of breaking the law.
This case is less "Google News is not accessible to people in Spain" and more "Google News can no longer publish content originated in Spain." The effect may be similar because Spaniards often want Spanish content, but what's happening seems different to your characterization.
Well, they are not just removing all Spanish news sources from the Spanish Google news site, they are removing the Spanish Google news site, which seems pretty consistent with his characterization.
Spanish people can, of course, still visit any other country's Google News page, though. There is no reason to keep a single country's Google News page open if there are no news sources from that country.
It's similar to the Google China situation back in the day, except Spain won't block access to foreign versions of Google News.
Effectively, no Spanish-Spain news in Google news. I wonder if other Spanish-speaking versions of Google News will still link to major Spanish newspapers that are also popular in South America. I'd expect so. Many Spanish sources will actively try to get into Google News from other countries so they can bypass this levy and prevent the loss of traffic/relevance somewhat.
It's remarkable that someone today tries to insult Google by claiming they aren't creating content. EVERYONE knows this. People use Google because they are great at organization information, not making it.
There's a difference between Google Search and Google News.
It is already an achievement to write the headlines of the news and to rank the importance of a piece of news. I consider this and all the editorial also as content.
With Google Search, Google does the ranking etc. and provides a substantial own service on demand to a specific search. People always go to the original site if it fits their search request. All good here. But with Google News they just copy the headlines and parts of the articles. They present it, kind of republish it in opposite to creating a search service.
Personally, I'm a bit pissed by the Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. because of their sneaky busines concepts. So my post is hostile (which it shouldn't be, but happens ...), but not insulting towards Google.
I think in this case it's a blurred line. In the case of Youtube even more. True, they don't want to create their own content, but when they republish it and making money by doing so, we're in the middle of the copyright discussion. The question to answer in each of Googles (or others) businesses is, when is Google presenting it's own work (search results, etc.) or the work of others.
Google is generally useful to the sites they link to. Most sites want a high rank on Google, because that brings them more visitors and more advertiser revenue, and Google offers them that service at no cost.
If they don't want Google to link to them, they can control that through robots.txt.
You may remember a recent German law that allowed German news sites to charge money for this, and Google removed links to news sites that didn't want to be listed for free. Pretty soon, all sites allowed Google to link to them again, because the loss of traffic hurt them.
Basically this amounts to the question: should search engines and aggregators be allowed to exist at all? Should we go back to the pre search engine days when you could only find new sites when someone discussed it on usenet, or through web rings (a network of sites about a similar subject where each links to the next one)?
See, this is what I don't really get. Sure, they can make money by selling ads on the content they're indexing (which is the primary reason their ranking system has to stay egalitarian, or roughly so with a few exceptions), but publishers are by no means obligated to purchase display ads from Google, or to host using Google's platforms (Youtube, Blogger, etc). Imho, it's only a blurred line iff a publisher chooses to make it so.
So, what are you insinuating exactly? That Google should stay away from providing any sort of news completely unless they are willing to build a team of journalists? What's wrong with aggregation?
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.
Completely agree with the sad trend. Though to be fair, the scourge of geolocation based blocking started with media companies (mostly American, but also bbc and others) in a bid to recreate the DVD region encoding bullshit on the internet. Add to that the NSA merrily slurping up data from the global firehose... there's no innocence left to corrupt at this point.
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, the quality of their shows, and for the British public, the last option is the best.
It's a strange system because the BBC is considered public broadcasting but is still funded (i.e. paid) by us citizens. You have to take the UK only as a subscription that we have implicitly paid. Of course, it would be great if they offered an outsider subscription, but there are undoubtedly internal political reasons why they haven't.
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
This is a business decision. BBC executives have already (probably) thought about whether they want to charge now or make it free now (and charge later). Its the age old question every company and startup faces -- shall I increase my reputation now and charge later or should I charge now. As its been already pointed out, BBC already has a great reputation.
Different business models result in different pricing decisions. Maybe BBC has determined that keeping things free globally is just not smart business sense for it because of real revenue foregone.
I believe that BBC sells a lot of its programs to channels around the world. I also believe it also markets various DVDs of its programs. BBC entertainment is also available as a paid channel in many countries. If it made these programs free on the web globally that business might be in doubt.
BBC is currently in a binary model which is to be free in UK and then sell its programs globally. The unintended consequence of that it ends up denying global internet users its programs.
What would be best, I believe, would be to provide all choices. For people who are willing to pay outside the UK -- bring them into a subscriber model of some sort. This way BBC can continue selling its programs to companies/channels/customers around the world and let internet users watch BBC programs, for a small cost.
Who knows? BBC might actually be working on subscriber pays model on the internet. Here other considerations come into play: bureaucratic sloth in an organization as big as the BBC and the time it takes to role out a subscription oriented video website.
Doubtful. Even if we were to offer the domestic rate, it currently works out $19/month. Incidentally one of the best things about iPlayer is that it's frictionless, high quality and ad-free. Introducing TV license login would be a huge bummer.
Its a combination of profit and political influence which is what makes BBC and interesting animal. The BBC world service radio gets Britain a lot of global coverage and political mindspace. Showing sherlock homes free?? Maybe not.
> Put things on the global internet and lose export value
If they don't feel like sharing, we can find other sources that will, there's no lack of quality content.
It's a pity that BBC sits on a million hours of TV and radio archived shows, that are collecting dust instead of being cited, posted, commented on, tagged, submitted, etc. Their loss. The web keeps growing and the BBC archives are offline. It's a kind of 'Encyclopedia Brittanica thinking' in an age of Wikipedia - trying to monetize at the expense of global accessibility.
Not exactly; the concept of fair use exists in the Berne convention, it's not just an American thing. Unfortunately, the convention only allows countries to establish fair use, it doesn't mandate it.
The other difference is that common law cares for the written intent, while under civil law judges should seek the underlying intent - which can be opposite to what is written down.
One recurring examples I've seen in German law training (but IANAL): two parties agree on the sale of a certain type of fish but use the wrong (Norwegian?) word in the contract. What fish is this contract about? Correct answer: What they meant, not what they wrote down.
This might (or might not) be different in common law - but obviously still isn't an issue unless one party brings the contract in front of a judge.
As for articles about legal cases: Highly popular cases typically make more sense when you dig into the details (eg. reading the actual decision, not just what some journalist misunderstood the court's abstract to be about). Sometimes they remain puzzling - but I fear that's a feature of all legal systems.
And then there's the additional complication that patent cases seem to run under ever-so-slightly different rules to ordinary civil cases, no matter where.
Europe has a stronger copyright which has actually proven a bit more sane than our software patent woes; both granting more protection than copyright but less than an algorithm patent.
Uh ? Fair use is (part of) a law. Laws are not subject to fair use. You are subject to laws, and yes, this changes some aspects of the legal concept that is called fair use (quotation rights), and that simply changes fair use.
Quoting Spanish news sources should no longer be considered fair use inside of Spain.
The doctrine of fair dealing, which is similar but more restrictive than fair use, exists in several Commonwealth countries: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are the ones I know of.
I hate to break it to you, but Google are not the only game in town. There are plenty of news aggregators (that generate revenue e.g., from advertising), and plenty of places that would be only too happy to step in and be the news-site-of-choice for the customers Google is leaving. Google departing the market will not "hurt Spain" in any meaningful way.
Of course, there are famous Spanish news aggregators like Menéame, which unlike Google can't abandon the boat and are already considering closing the website or banning any local news source. The "tax" imposed by this law is too big for making any aggregator profitable, and like other similar Spanish "taxes" managed by private entities, the law is so ambigous that you can't even expect to be fined nly once.
> There are plenty of news aggregators (that generate revenue e.g., from advertising), and plenty of places that would be only too happy to step in and be the news-site-of-choice for the customers Google is leaving.
The consensus in Spain is that this law is very bad for ALL of the aggregators
I think you have misinterpreted the news. It's not Google News is shutting down in Spain. It's just Google can't no longer link to news stories in Spanish news publishers without paying. Google News can still run fine in Spain, just without the local stories. Presumably global news or Spanish news from other sources can still be viewed in Google News if Google chose not to shut it down.
I am not sure about that. Were any of the AOL sites available in Russia or Japan in 1998?
Also didn't compuserve do the same and block their services from non paying users (which means if your country's credit card is not accepted you are SOL)?
I am under the impression that walled gardens and splitting by countries or networks were also pretty common.
I'm not sure how this totally nonsensical and erroneous reading of the post and subsequent comments have hijacked this thread, so at the risk of being patronizing allow me to explain this as simply as I can:
Spain passed a law that "forces" news publishers to collect a levy from online news aggregators.
Online news aggregators will be fined if they aren't paying the copyright levy (yeah it's that ridiculous).
Nor publishers or aggregators can optout of this arrangement.
Google is stopping the Google News aggregation in Spain. They are NOT GEO-BLOCKING IT.
As we all know, Google's reaction isn't the result the people pushing for the law intended. Do you think they will just give up? They've already gone through several rounds in several countries on this issue, so I don't. Considering that past experience, I'd say there's a substantial chance the law will be amended to be stricter and more far-reaching and/or it will be interpreted that way by the courts.
Do you have any info on why Spain passed that law, such as white papers proposing the law or debates given in their version of parliament? Was it specifically to force companies like Google to shut down, or was that an unintended side effect?
It's common for businesses in a supply chain to each pay a proportion of sales tax (e.g. GST in Australia, and in NZ), so it doesn't seem all that ridiculous for a country to do the same with a "copyright levy" in the media/search industry.
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.
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 Internet access at all they would have access to the site in question.
All of that simplicity and innocence has slipped away.