News organisations could charge Google for links under new EU copyright reforms

NEWS organisations in Europe will be given the right to charge internet giants such as Google to link to their content in a major shake-up of copyright reforms planned by Brussels.

The European Commission has drawn up proposals to hand publishers “exclusive rights” to their content.

The plans, which will be published next month, will force aggregators such as Google News to agree terms to show parts of stories.

Internal documents seen by the Financial Times warn that declining rev- enues at media organisations mean the policy is needed to promote “media pluralism”.

News outlets would not be obliged to levy a fee, while links by users to publicly available content will not be affected by the proposed changes.

Christian Wigand, a spokesperson for the Commission, said: “Let’s be clear: granting such rights to news publishers would not affect the way users share hyperlinks on the internet. It would recognise their role as investors in content.”

Spain and Germany have already changed copyright laws to enable news organisations to charge aggregators. The policy, dubbed the “Google Tax” in Spain, forced search giants to pay a fee to Spanish newspapers for linking to their material or face a fine of up to €600,000 (£513,000).

Google responded by shutting down its news service in the country ahead of the policy’s introduction at the start of 2015. It claimed that introducing charges “for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications” was unsustainable.

In Germany, many news organisations opted to waive charges after their websites suffered big drops in traffic.