Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
So it's the fault of the free market?
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No, it's the fault of big media corporations (especially newspapers) and their foolish lobbying.
In Germany, they lobbied for a law entitling them to royalties from people who linked to their site using snippets of copyright material. So Google stopped linking to them, their web traffic slumped, and the big players agreed a free license to their content with Google.
So in Spain, the media companies looked what happened in Germany, and instead of deciding the whole thing was a bad idea, decided that the possibility of free licences was the problem, and lobbied for a similar law, but with a compulsory licensing free. Google still isn't linking to them, and their traffic has also slumped.
It's just a really, really, bad idea. I can't think it will get through the EU Commission, but if it does I'm certain that the EU Parliament won't go for it.