Madrid Metropolitan Welcomes Return Of Google News In Spain

November 14, 2021November 15, 2021 Madrid Metropolitan Business, spain news

The Madrid Metropolitan has welcomed the announcement by news aggregator, Google News, that it will be returning following a 7-year hiatus due to Spain´s stringent copyright laws

The Google News service was closed in 2014 after the Spanish government passed a law obliging Google and other news aggregators to pay a central licence fee to Spanish news organisations for re-using their stories.

However the goverment has announced that the 2014 law has been overturned as Spain adopts an EU directive allowing online media platforms to negotiate licensing fees directly with news organisations.

In practice, this means that Google News is now free to bargain with individual publishers in Spain, instead of having to pay a collective fee to the Spanish news industry as a whole.

The legislation behind Google News’s decision is the European Copyright Directive, which grants a so-called “neighbouring right” to news publishers, allowing them to be paid when extracts of their content are re-published online..

Arsenio Escolar, chairman of the CLABE publishers association, which represents around 1,000 Spanish news outlets, a majority of them digital, said he was pleased with the new legislation.

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