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BRUSSELS—The European Union's executive branch will propose formal legislation that would help publishers seek remuneration from news aggregators such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google news search that list snippets of articles on their website, according to internal documents seen by The Wall Street Journal.

In a draft document outlining its legislative proposals to update the bloc's copyright rules, which is expected to be formally announced in late September, the European Commission said the new EU-wide rules would hand news publishers "legal certainty and bargaining power" against online services using their content.

A draft version of the legislative proposal requires member states to grant publishers additional rights over the online use of their articles, which would last for 20 years after publication of the articles.

"It is necessary to provide a harmonized legal protection for news publications in respect of online uses within the European Union," the draft proposal says. "Such protection can be effectively guaranteed through the introduction, in Union law, of rights related to copyright for the reproduction and making available to the public of news publications in respect of online uses."

The EU's 28 commissioners still need to formally sign off on the proposal before it becomes official.

The legislative outline follows an internal assessment that set out the commission's preferred policy options, which included encouraging national governments to draw up legislation that would require news aggregators and social media companies to pay publishers for using their content when publishers seek compensation.

That initial assessment, however, didn't explicitly state that the commission would propose new legislation on the matter.

The copyright proposal is in the form of a directive, meaning that member states decide how to implement the EU rules. This means the countries can also determine sanctions for companies failing to comply.

But similar initiatives in Spain and Germany have failed to halt further financial erosion for publishers. Google shut down its news service in Spain while publishers in Germany eventually granted Google a free license to publish its content after traffic from the search engine sank.

Once it makes the formal announcement about the new copyright legislation, the commission's proposals would then be debated by the European Parliament and member states, where they will likely be amended before entering into law.

Member states will then have 12 months to transpose the rules into their national laws, according to the draft proposal.

The commission's move is part of a broader initiative to level the regulatory playing field between newer internet companies and more traditional industries.

Earlier this year the EU said it scrapped previous plans to regulate an array of web companies from different industries—be it search engines, social-media platforms, chauffeuring or financial services—under one sweeping piece of legislation. Instead, it said it would deal with any problems arising from disruption by web platforms in its various proposals, including in new copyright and telecoms rules.

According to a separate internal document about upcoming telecoms proposals, the commission is set to propose more rules for so-called over-the-top telecommunications services such as Microsoft Corp.'s Skype or Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp, in a bid to help the bloc's big telecom operators better compete.

News Corp, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, earlier this year filed an official complaint to the European Commission over Google's practices with its news search service.

News Corp claims that Google reinforces its dominance in general search by refusing to show articles at all if the publisher doesn't consent to Google's habit of "scraping" or copying content from publishers to display the results of news articles.

Write to Natalia Drozdiak at natalia.drozdiak@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 31, 2016 08:25 ET (12:25 GMT)

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