Editorial Board
Europe's Google News Tax Makes No Sense
The European Commission's new copyright rules are in dire need of revision.
Old media, new rights.
Photographer: John Macdougall/AFP/Getty ImagesA "Digital Single Market," like a single currency, is one of those grand European ideas that sounds better than it works. Take, for example, the European Commission's clumsy attempt to use copyright law as a cudgel against U.S. interlopers such as Google and Facebook.
One provision of a new bill proposed by the European Commission accords publishers the right to a license fee whenever a news aggregator such as Google News uses even a snippet of the publisher's content. Currently aggregators pay no such fee.