Abstract

During 2014, Germany and Spain reformed their copyright laws, with the specific goal of making Google news compensate newspaper publishers for the use of third parties’ copyrightable works. These reforms were based on ancillary rights in Germany, and unwaivable rights in Spain (until now reserved to moral –and therefore personal– rights). In Spain, as a direct consequence of the legal reform, Google news decided, for the first time, to stop offering its service in a specific country. These initiatives join earlier efforts, using both legal and jurisprudential approaches, to attempt to make the American giant pay, and they have caused a debate on whether or not the European Union should clarify its opinion on the matter, even though it may contradict existing legal doctrine, such as the decision about the use of hyperlinks in the Svensson case.

Abstract

This radiography of the state of digital media in 2009 pays special attention to the situation in Spain and references to the international situation. The main points are: the crisis of the media, major ups (La información.com and Factual) and downs (Adn.es and Soitu.es), the return to pay-for-content, the conflict between newspapers and Google, the relationship with Facebook and Twitter, “link journalism”, developments in digital newspaper archives and reading devices for news.

Abstract

The Google News Spain service has been relaunched after 8 years owing to the approval in Congress of the European copyright directive that allows Spanish media to make their own decisions on how to monetize and discover their content. This paper aims to present a review of the challenges and opportunities that the return of Google News Spain represents for professionals in the journalistic sector as well as for academics and scholars of communication, documentation, and web visibility. To this end, an analysis of the operation and new services of Google’s news aggregator is carried out.