The Spanish parliament has approved a new law, under which aggregation services like Google News will have to pay news sites for the links included in the search result.
Publishers are claiming that aggregation services are infringing on copyrighted materials, but the search giant claims that the news stories are linked to the official website which is within the bounds of fair use.
AEDE, a Spanish association consisting of top media companies in the country pressurised the Spanish Government to impose tax on Google and other aggregators for linking their website.
Starting from 1st January 2015 the law will go into effect, but the details of the tax, which Spain’s AEDE group of news publishers termed as "Google Tax" has not been specified.
Google’s Spanish division said that it was disappointed with the decision of the parliament and is planning to work with Spanish news publishers to help them increase income, reported The Associated Press.
The search giant faced similar problem with French publishers but it managed to settle the dispute by helping the publishers increase online advertising revenue and also funded digital publishing innovations.
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