New or not, news aggregation is today provoking fierce debate in media circles. Some, such as Davidovitz, argue that it has a “disruptive and positive” influence with advantages for “both curator and creator.”
For Irene Lanzaco at the Association of Spanish Newspaper Publishers, however, news aggregators have created “an unbalanced situation between publishers and tech companies” and have the potential to “weaken the trademark of newspapers.»
Lanzaco is hoping to pass legislation in Spain that will require all aggregator sites to pay compensation to publishers whose material they copy.
Under the new law, the original publisher will be compensated even for the reproduction of headlines and snippets of text. Written permission and a greater fee will be demanded if an aggregator wishes to reproduce the whole article.