Sometimes when the gods wish to punish us, Oscar Wilde quipped, they answer our prayers.

He could have been speaking directly to Spain’s old guard publishers in their fight against Google. The latest target: Google News. The Spanish Association of Daily Newspaper Publishers lobbied hard for a law that would charge services such as Google News for showing one- and two-sentence excerpts from their articles, the snippets that preview what a user is about to click on. The law passed and the fees were supposed to go into effect Jan. 1.

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