A proposed reform of European Union copyright law grants online news publishers additional rights that could lead to the closure of services such as Google News if strictly enforced.

Copyright law already provides reporters with protection for the news stories they publish, but in a draft directive published Wednesday the European Commission wants to create an additional, related right giving newspapers more powers to make news aggregators pay for using snippets consisting of, say, the headline and a sentence or two of each story.

News publishers say that in reusing such snippets without payment, aggregators like Google News are stealing their content. Meanwhile, the aggregators maintain that they are sending news websites additional traffic they can monetize.

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