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11 Indian J. Intell. Prop. L. 223 (2020)
The Snippet Tax: Enabling Access to Fake News?

handle is hein.journals/ijipl11 and id is 224 raw text is: 223 THE SNIPPET TAX: ENABLING ACCESS TO FAKE NEWS? Kali Srikari Kancherla* Abstract The Internet has enabled the large-scale dissemination of disinformation and fake news in society. Many countries have begun recognising the problem of fake news and have started to adopt measures to control its circulation. In 2019, the European Union ('EU) Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market ('the Directive') was adopted. Draft Article 11 (Article 15 in the final Directive), introduced the 'snippet tax' which creates a new set of exclusive intellectual property rights ('IPR ) giving news publishers the right to charge royalties to anyone who uses or shows news snippets, i.e., short summaries of journalistic online content created by online news publishers. This tax in particular will impact search engines like Google that feature snippets on its search page. While the EU claims that this will have a beneficial impact by protecting news publishers from a loss of revenues caused due to Google 's commercial use of snippets, and promote a free and diverse press as a result, a closer examination shows otherwise. This article seeks to demonstrate how this new ancillary IP protection exacerbates the problem offake news and misinformation. It first explores the impact IPRs have on fake news in general and highlights the unintended consequences that the snippet tax has had on the market for information in jurisdictions in which it was enacted previously. Based on this, the paper will study the impact that the implementation of the Directive by EU member states will have on news publishers, consumers, and innovation in the * Kali Srikari Kancherla is a B.A. LLB (Hons.) student from National Law University, Delhi.

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