Google Won’t Have To Pay CEDRO For Discover – Clustered Publishers Losing Battle To Be Rewarded For Showing Their News

Judicial blow to CEDRO, the organization that represents the rights of authors and publishers of books, magazines and other media and publications. After filing a lawsuit against Google in June 2021, the Justice has dismissed the lawsuit in which demanded a payment of 1.1 million euros in copyright concepts for the use of the news on Google Discover.

The arguments of the judgment of the Commercial Court nº16 of Madrid are a clear blow to the copyright association and represent a recognition of Google’s practices with Discover. The rights associations they got in 2014 that Google News closed in Spain, but his fight against Discover doesn’t look like he’s going to be as successful.

Google Can Sleep Easy: Discover News Aren’t “Meaningful Snippets”

Sentence, published mid December, sums it up by the jurist from Oviedo Javier Núñez Seoane. Google will not have to pay CEDRO and also the judge charges harshly against the organization of rights in various sections.

The underlying issue is that, according to Jorge Corrales, CEO of CEDRO: “the search engine refuses to remunerate newspaper and magazine editors for the use of articles in their aggregator, in breach of the provisions of article 32.2 of our Law of Intellectual Property “. Google Discover, the page that appears on Android mobiles where all kinds of news are shown, has “has dramatic consequences for the diversity of the press,” according to Corrales.

Justice has Dismissed that Discover’s news is a violation of the Intellectual Property Law. It is true that Spanish law provides for financial compensation for the aggregation of “non-significant fragments” of journalistic content, but according to the judges, this is not the case with Google Discover.

3️⃣ As the 1st “legal” consideration, the Court appreciates that since the Google Rate motivated Google to close its GOOGLE NEWS service in Spain, the CEDRO entity could not “collect the amount that was expected” so it has tried to compensate that loss with this lawsuit. .. pic.twitter.com/adnIpSaCGU

– Javier N Seoane (@abotgado_es) January 5, 2022

According to the judges, the news displayed in Discover does not differ from the links displayed in the search engine. More than fragments, they define it as “single words”, nullifying any substantive claim on the part of CEDRO.

It is interesting, as Seoane points out, that within the context of the sentence it is explained that the Google Rate, which motivated the closure of Google News in Spain, did not allow CEDRO “to collect the amount that was expected” and that this complaint may be in part to compensate with that money that they stopped earning.

If we add to this that the judge considers that the calculation of the 1.1 million euros has no basis neither in the rates applied nor in the calculation method, we have that Google will be able to sleep peacefully.

It seems that times have changed. Gone is when the SGAE or the associations of rights managers marked the step of Google. Instead of in court, disputes between press editors and Google are resolved through negotiations such as those related to the ‘Iceta Law’, which will allow the return of Google News to Spain seven years later.

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