Spain’s newspapers, so out of step with the digital age
Events in the wake of the Spanish government’s announcement earlier this month that it intends to change Spain’s intellectual property right laws, one aspect of which is that news aggregators will have to pay a fee to news organizations for providing links to their content, has uncovered a dreadful stink: this maneuver reeks of corruption, and is about the opaque sharing out of institutional advertising, aimed at buying the favors of the press in the run up to a number of key polls, culminating in next year’s general elections. Recent weeks have seen the replacement of the editors of three of the country’s main newspapers: El Mundo, La Vanguardia, and El País.
The current government, like all its predecessors, is not answerable to anybody regarding the way that it distributes tax-payer funded advertising, and does so entirely at its own discretion. Spain urgently needs to create mechanisms to ensure that this is done transparently.
To be clear: news aggregators having to pay media outlets for links to their content is simply another way for the government to buy the media’s good will. These payments will be collected by the country’s authorship rights societies, not very well regarded since one of them, SGAE, has already been embroiled in a corruption scandal, on the basis of content providers’ “inalienable right” to what they produce, subject to such illogical criteria as “the losses that each media will have incurred”, a hefty incentive to said media to continuing refusing to adapt to the realities of the digital age.
The first thing to point out here is that the sole beneficiary of this bounty will be the members of the Association of Spanish Daily Newspapers, the AEDE. Spain’s other publications association, the AEEPP, sees news aggregators as allies and a source of opportunity.
Not that the sweetheart deal cooked up between the AEDE and the government is going unchallenged. The prospect of a tax on providing links to news content freely available on the web has prompted Menéame, a Spanish-language web community inspired by Digg, to boycott content produced by AEDE members, and to provide plugins to advise readers if they visit their sites. Other initiatives include hacking AEDE’s website, and an app providing information on non-AEDE members’ sites. This will likely lead to mass unfollows on social network sites like Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, following the recent experience of Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul, who has lost some 100,000 followers. We may see a mass boycott of AEDE publications, a perfectly legitimate and democratic initiative.
Furthermore, there is division within the AEDE itself. I have spoken to several senior journalists in the digital side of AEDE publications, all of whom oppose the planned move toward asking aggregators to pay for linking and referencing their content.
The AEDE really needs to think this through, and pull back from the precipice before it is too late. Many within the organization’s own workforce disagree with a decision that they know will reduce the traffic to their sites provided by news aggregators. What the AEDE and the Spanish government have achieved here, aside from causing tremendous collateral damage to third parties, is put Google in the invidious position of either paying out huge sums of money to pay this preposterous tax, or to break with one of the founding principles of the internet: open access to information, something that I suspect it will not be willing to do. We shall see.
Either way, in the long run, this is not good news for the AEDE. It has shown its hand, and that it is prepared to sell its favors to the highest bidder, or the government of the day.
