The Right to Link: Spain Versus the Internet
But the implications of the law could go beyond the question of whether Google News is good or bad for publishers. The law troubles advocates of Internet freedom (and, one imagines, Google and other Internet companies) because it seems to fit into a broader pattern, in Europe, of government actions that undermine what is sometimes known as the “right to link.” The best-known example of this is the decision, in May, by the European Court of Justice, that Europeans have a right to have links to information about them removed from search results—the “right to be forgotten,” which Jeffrey Toobin covered for the magazine in September.
“Linking is fundamental to the way the Web works,” Jeremy Malcolm, a policy analyst at the Electronic Freedom Foundation, told me. Search engines work by turning up links to sites whose content matches a search query; much of the sharing that takes place on social-media sites is of links; journalists themselves—including for this Web site—use links in their articles to provide context for their own pieces. (And, of course, those links are often accompanied by text snippets.) Malcolm noted that, in February, the European Court of Justice affirmed that when a Web-site owner links to a person’s copyrighted work on another site, that doesn’t constitute copyright infringement. But, he told me, “Having said that, there is no positive right to link expressed in legislation or any international agreement.”