The European Commission (EC) is determined to reform copyright in order to more effectively protect publishers' rights on the Internet.
However, as reported by the German newspaper Die Zeit , the European executive has been hiding for more than a year a report that contradicts its position on the "copyright" associated with news appearing on Google News and other online news aggregators.
The study in question, entitled “Online News Aggregation and Neighbouring Rights for News Publishers” , concludes that the extension of copyright for online publishers (known in these parts as the AEDE canon ) would in reality come to nothing and could even be counterproductive for publishers.
In Spain and Germany, publishers have already seen their copyrights extended when publishing their news on the Internet. Under these rights, publishers are allowed to demand payment from Google News and other news aggregators for using links to their articles on these platforms.
However, to date, neither Google nor other online aggregators have paid slovenia phone number a cent to publishers. In Spain, the internet giant was forced to close down Google News in 2014. In Germany, however , the issue was not resolved and publishers (with a few exceptions) finally gave Google their consent to continue using their articles on the Google News service free of charge.
According to the report, which has been silenced by the European Commission, the supposedly soothing effect of extending copyrights for online publishers is actually null from an economic point of view.
The study concludes that publishers actually benefit from the presence of their content on news aggregators, as Google News and company attract more traffic to their websites and this traffic also translates into an increase in their advertising revenue.
In Spain, for example, the disappearance of Google News would have led to losses for smaller websites, while larger websites would have been largely unaffected by the removal of Google's news aggregator.
Julia Reda , a member of the German Pirate Party in the European Parliament, is convinced that the EC report has been deliberately kept under lock and key because its conclusions are extremely "embarrassing" for Brussels and would inevitably delay copyright reform.