[[File:Flag_of_Spain.svg|thumb|left|Flag of Spain.]]
On its blog, {{w|Google}}, {{w|U.S.}} headquartered multinational corporation specializing in {{w|Internet}}-related services and products, announced it would be permanently shutting down the Spanish version of {{W|Google News}}, effective from December 16 of this year. The shutdown came in direct response to amendments to the {{w|Spain|Spanish}} intellectual property law —''Ley De Propiedad Intelectual''— imposing a compulsory fee for the use of snippets of text to link to news articles, by online news aggregators that provide a search service.
The Spanish intellectual property law passed the Senate on October 15, passed Congress in October 30, and would take effect starting in January 2015. Spain decided to make the right to payment {{wikt|inalienable}}, so that even the news organization quoted is not permitted to waive it. It was not a characteristic of Google News to monetize its news service with ads, and Google said continuing to run the service was not sustainable at the time.
A similar fee had been first introduced in {{w|Germany|German}} law in 2013, where it was described as an "{{W|Ancillary copyright for press publishers|ancillary copyright}}" — ''{{wikt|Leistungsschutzrecht}}''. But the fee actually has no heritage inInternational copyright law, whichpreservedpreserves the right to make quotations without remuneration under international law; in fact, it was the only such mandatory limitation to copyright. TheIn German law had been a manifest failure, whereGermany publishers willingly forfeited their right to payment from Google, as soon as they realizedgiven how much traffic they would lose from not being indexed on Google News.
The {{W|Electronic Frontier Foundation}} had expressed concerns that "these ancillary copyright laws formedform part of a broader trend of derogation from the right to link." In a news article EFFThey saidcontinued, "This can be seen when you examine the other parts of the Spanish copyright amendments that take effect in January —notably[...] — notably placing criminal liability on website operators who refuse to remove mere ''links'' to copyright-infringing material." EFF quoted the recent introduction of the so-called "{{W|Right to be Forgotten}}" legislation allowing removal of entries from Google web search results.
