New legislation is set to be introduced in Spain to prevent news aggregators from reproducing other’s content without payment. Paul McClean speaks to a digital media consultant and a representative of the Spanish Publishers Association to discuss the ethics of aggregation.
“Aggregation is not new,” says Grig Davidovitz, CEO of RGB Media. “It has always been done. In the past, evening papers would quote the morning papers’ stories. Aggregation is just the modern-day equivalent.”
New or not, news aggregation is today provoking fierce debate in media circles. Some, such as Davidovitz, argue that it has a “disruptive and positive” influence with advantages for “both curator and creator.”
For Irene Lanzaco at the Association of Spanish Newspaper Publishers, however, news aggregators have created “an unbalanced situation between publishers and tech companies” and have the potential to “weaken the trademark of newspapers.»
Lanzaco is hoping to pass legislation in Spain that will require all aggregator sites to pay compensation to publishers whose material they copy.
Under the new law, the original publisher will be compensated even for the reproduction of headlines and snippets of text. Written permission and a greater fee will be demanded if an aggregator wishes to reproduce the whole article.
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