Spain's Link Tax Taxes Journalist's Patience 113
rsmiller510 writes Spain's new tax on linking to Spanish newspaper articles is ill defined and short sighted and ends up protecting a dying industry, while undermining a vibrant one. In another case of disrupted industries turning to lawmakers to solve their problems, this one makes no sense at all, especially given the state of the Spanish economy and the fact that it comes 15 years too late to even matter. From the article: "While newspapers are at least partly correct to blame the Internet for their troubles, they should recognize that their own mismanagement also played a key role. Newspapers everywhere waited much too long to take the Internet seriously, and while virtually every surviving newspaper has a website now, they almost invariably treat those sites as a necessary evil, as something separate from the news collection and delivery that they do with print."
Re:The "dying industry"... (Score:1, Informative)
The destruction of journalism has little to do with the internet.
It's mostly down to everyone putting out company press releases like it was news.
If newspaper companies continued to do actual research and then require the same subscription for delivering a pdf to your inbox every day I think people wouldn't mind. The problem is that they release the same shit everyone does, and demand a premium for the right to read it.
Re:A right to be remembered? (Score:3, Informative)
They don't want their sites to be blocked.
They want their sites to be listed, and to be paid for the privilege of letting you list them.
Re:A right to be remembered? (Score:4, Informative)
"The simplest course of action would be for the major search engines, i.e. Google (there are some others, I'm told) to simply cut those spanish newspapers out of it's web-crawlers and search functions. If there are no links to the newspapers in question, there can be no tax to pay."
True but it would mean cutting off links to all spanish newspapers! The law makes the payment mandatory to prevent any forward thinking papers from having an unfair advantage.