Slashdot Mirror
EU Copyright Reform Proposes Search Engines Pay For Snippets (thestack.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader reports that the European Commission "is planning reforms that would allow media outlets to request payment from search engines such as Google, for publishing snippets of their content in search results." The Stack reports:
The working paper recommends the introduction of an EU law that covers the rights to digital reproduction of news publications. This would essentially make news publishers a new category of rights holders under copyright law, thereby ensuring that "the creative and economic contribution of news publishers is recognized and incentivized in EU law, as it is today the case for other creative sectors."
the eu does some o.k. things, but then they pull stuff like this out of their collective asses.
just the administration of some bullshit like this is going to cost so much more than the 'snippets' are worth....
and where 'fair use' exists, 'snippets' are covered so long as they are just a very short excerpt. so, sorry, bub. try again.
"Well, we'd rather not have to pay, so... we'll just not index your content anymore. kthxbye"
(Meanwhile Microsoft probably had something to say too, but nobody asked.)
If you apply economics and logic, you'll quickly see that this proposal would lead to the death of publishers. Google has no incentive to pay for every publisher on the net, so the choice between paying or de-listing is simple. A publisher who is not on Google is not a publisher for long :-)
Many proposals are made by a lot of people within the EC and many of them are rejected. This one is gonna be rejected so fast Google will not even hear about it.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I'm excited to see how far off the rails the EU becomes. It's going to be a massive train wreck!
Would be to simply ban those media outlets from showing up in ANY search results. Problem solved!
This idea was already implemented in Germany (Leistungsschutzrecht, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers). It failed completely as google just stopped linking to some of the papers and they suddenly had a drop in their user counts and advertisement revenue. So especially google never paid anything. So it's strange that they try to implement in the whole EU if it's obvious that is does not work like intended...
We have a sensible provision in US copyright law called "fair use" that allows small pieces of copyrighted material to be reproduced within reason. Here in the US, those snippets are almost certainly protected as fair use, which is very reasonable. It provides a small preview of the article that is being clicked on, to provide a better experience for search engine users. Headlines are often poorly written, so those previews are actually useful. Perhaps the EU needs to protect fair use of copyrighted material. It's common sense, and it shouldn't hurt publishers who actually write good articles. I suppose they would like more people to click on articles with provocative headlines but don't have good content, so they can make more ad revenue. This is a truly stupid decision by the EU, and US copyright law is far more sensible in this regard.
And watch everyone else lose money until the EU caved in.
Presumably they could still report snippets from outside the EU so the net effect is that the EU media loses readers and advertising revenue. Well that's what's happened when individual countries tried this. And as for another player coming in, well unless someone subsidises it, it'll lose money on day one - and make that up on volume (not !).
Then we'll have you pay us for the clickbait headlines! And you can't know until you click it, whether it's randomly generated crap or just badly written bull!
And we'll charge dollars for it! every click! And we'll get a pony, and a magic princess, and a castle...
When you see something like this your first reaction is bound to be, "Well, stupid ignorant politicians proposing foolish laws that wouldn't work - yet again". And yet... politicians aren't always stupid and ignorant. Many of them have a certain low rat-like cunning, especially when it comes to getting and keeping office, and currying favour with the rich and powerful who can help them. So, just as a hypothesis, what more might be behind a proposal like this?
The obvious starting point is that, rather than pay a tax to content owners in return for doing the service of indexing and making known what they have to offer, search engine companies would simply stop indexing all such material. That would be really bad, huh? Or would it... from a certain point of view. Suppose you own the New York Times or The Guardian or some other boring obnoxious conventional media outlet. Your view of the Web is probably pretty jaundiced. It's full of people who find your stories through search engines and then read them for free - unless you put up a paywall, in which case they just stop coming altogether. Moreover, increasingly they don't even want your lousy stories because they can find so much better and more up-to-date material on the Web, from a thousand independent and dynamic sources. In fact, in the long run your company is probably facing bankruptcy sooner or later because it can't compete with what's available (mostly free) online. Not good. Wouldn't it be marvellous if someone could put a stop to all this "Web" nonsense and take us all back to the good ol' days when you just had to pay for your newspaper and your cable TV and take whatever they gave you? Wouldn't it?
The search engines could just stop indexing such sites, but over time - at least, so the politicians might think - that would shrink the search engines' usefulness so much that they might go right out of business. Oh boo-hoo, the conventional media owners would grin, rubbing their hands happily. What a terrible shame.
And we, who rely so much on the Web, would find it that much less rich and useful. We really should be thinking about how to react to politicians, responding to their rich buddies, who want to shut down the free Web and replace it with a monitored, controlled pay-per-view thing much along the lines of what Bill Gates had in mind before the Web came along and spoiled his day.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
They should hire TheRegister editors to train the algorithms. Then I might go back to reading news.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
But who steps up to the plate and calls them? The EVIL EU UMP, that's who!!
I identify as an EU citizen. I come from Spain. I live in Germany. I talk fluently three, passably five EU languages.
That said, I'm utterly pissed off at the gang of mafiosi the European Commission is. It's just a meeting point of (rich) lobbies doing their thing.
Yes, Juncker, I'm looking at you and your ilk! Setting up a tax haven in the middle of the EU. And then you act suprised when people in Greece (who are struggling for survival [1]) don't like you. Bunch of cynical assholes.
Perhaps we should dust off the guillotines of the French Revolution.
[1] No. I'm not talking about those having accepted the bribes for buying German submarines (under Papandreou). Those are doing fine, thankyouverymuch. The amount due for those submarines, btw, is a significant fraction of the so-called "aids" given as loans to the greek banks.
I can't see how this is bad. Search engine companies make money from their content (which is really our content).
How is charging them negative? They didn't create anything novel and have done a minimal amount of work for their "hits"....
They'll just remove the newspapers from search results, just like the other umpteen times it was tried.
Are those same news publishers also going to have to pay the sources of the snippets (ie quotes) they publish in news articles?
Why all the fuss? They can already de-list themselves.
"is planning reforms that would allow media outlets to request payment from search engines such as Google, for publishing snippets of their content in search results"
IMO they got that backwards. It's not the outlets that drive traffic to search engines, it's the search engines that help that traffic to reach the outlets.
If I were a search engine provider/developer, I just might happen to come up with the idea to require outlets to pay me for indexing their content in the first place.
There's nothing forcing search engines to index the idiots' contents. They should actually be either thankful that they can be found, or create a better search engine that they can control - and which noone will use.
Lots of content providers would never be found without the search engines. They should be a bit more humble and re-evaluate who's who in this relationship.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
what if search engines just dropped all your data and info completely and then you just disappeared off the internet completely??? then the cost of advertising your products and services would quadruple
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Google probably, rather than quaking in its boots, is slobbering... It obviously has the power to renegotiate with publishers, whereas the (hypothetical) "next, best" search engine, which is just starting up and would have been the "Google killer", will not have power or money to pay for snippets.
"Thanks, EU!" says Google.
A similar attempt to charge search engines for snippets in Spain resulted in the shutdown of Google News in the country, and is believed to have contributed to a 14% loss in traffic and related closing of several Spanish publications. When faced with the closing of Google News, the Spanish Newspapers Publishers’ Association requested intervention from the Spanish government and EU competition authorities, but to no avail.
Journalism is almost entirely taking "snippets" from other people in the form of quotes and information and compiling them into a story, so I must assume the newspapers will also be paying out royalties on their articles to anyone they interview, mention, or quote (including when they search for comments on twitter and facebook as they like to do now).
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Except for the fact that I don't see this working except as it did in Germany (where publishers in the end renegotiated with Google because they figured out they were left holding the short end of the stick), I see an opportunity for anyone who knows these languages and just makes non-EU based "news abstract" sites which paraphrase abstracts of news articles and link back to the original ones. If they are good enough, Google might just start using their abstracts for snippets, and they get click-through traffic on the way to the real article...
The news itself is information and as such is not covered by copyright (in most jurisdictions, anyway). Only the actual wording and organization of the original article is covered by copyright.
News publishers are struggling to make money on the internet, but they still have political influence. So the idea was to force Google to share some of its profits by forcing it to pay license fees for the snippets on news.google.com. Lobbyists claimed that this would only be used to target Google and smaller services needn't worry.
What happened of course, was that that Google discontinued the service in the relevant countries and the number of news readers plummeted. The publishers gave Google an exception to get their visitors back. Now the only result is that anyone from bloggers to other news aggregators is facing legal problems. They can contact the publishers, but are usually ignored.
As a result, the legislation only cemented Googles dominance.
Many other posters have already pointed out this failed in the past, and God bless the magnicent AC who pointed out Google should be charging the flagging publications for driving traffic to their sites in the first place. On this occasion, I'm on Google's side
Now as for EU Commissioner Oettinger check out his Wikipedia page. Typical fucking EU bureaucract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
He's was also responsible for the EU ban on kettles which was one big factor in driving the tea loving brits out of the EU: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Let me put in in terms an American would understand: It'd be like trying to ban coffee in America.
So you run a blog, you disagree with a published news article and quote relevant pieces of the source text. Fair use exemptions under copyright for the purposes of research, review and criticism are entirely justified. However, the search engines now index your blog post... hilarity ensues.
What other creative sector gets an opt-out from fair use?
Do they understand that if they charge google for including search results, google will just totally drop that source, effectively killing that pages revenue?
Or do they have their heads so far up their asses they dont care?
Didn't Germany already try this? The media outlets lost money, for obvious reasons. So who the fuck thinks it's going to work the second time?
And that is the point. It is "content", not news anymore. Hardly anyone is "reporting" on anything. Look at nearly every single tech site. They only just regurgitate press releases from this or that manufacture or "report" on what was written on some other site.
Everything they post is skin deep drivel.
Most of the "so called" news sites are nothing more than click bait at best and attempts to brainwash the masses into adopting the political message of whoever owns the site.
There are a couple of sites which I do carry a subscription to, but those are the few who really take the time to research their articles.
Google would be doing us a favor to just delist nearly all sites.
Should the robots file be updated to indicate a site requires payment to appear in search results? Sure for anyone who gets tech it will be equivalent to 'do not index', but maybe a lesson to content owners?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"In an attempt to save Spanish publishers from the horrors of being sent monetizable traffic by Google News the authorities have managed to cause the closure of that service in that country. There is almost no one who benefits from this new law and a considerable number of people who lose out. Further, the way the law has been written means that there’s no real way out for any of the participants."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/12/11/spanish-practices-close-google-news-in-spain/
She is exactly right.
I wonder, where does it say that singers / actors deserve vast sums of money? Why do governments try to protect these businesses which the people have decided are not worth the amount of money they are asking for? Where is the free market love everyone is talking about?
Well if the news publishers are going to bill the search providers for the news they report, are the publishers then going to pay the people that they report on for the stories/content they are effectively producing?
the European Commission "is planning reforms that would allow media outlets to request payment from search engines such as Google, for publishing snippets of their content in search results."
In unrelated news, search engines are planning to encourage media outlets to provide payment to include snippets of their content in search results.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
"News paper industry not failing fast enough, seeks to increase the pace of it's demise by further reducing it's readership."
Pretty soon the mega news media entertainment industry will collapse and we can get on with citizen reporting. Anyone can do better than the lipstick-smothered anchors found on weather.com anyways.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I propose EU bureaucrats paying for ropes for them...
The sooner they will be hung, the better.
We need to end copyright. We won't do that unless liberty minded people everywhere join together to form an independent state where government has no real power. We can solve many of the problems of government by eliminating it. There are other ways to exchange goods (BitCoins, etc) and take care of health, safety, medical, charity, currency, roads, and other matters without government involvement.
I'm receiving and spending BitCoins daily. I buy produce from neighbours and friends in Keene (and we only got 30,000 people here) for BitCoin. I get lunch for BitCoin (Local Burger, Vietnamese Food Truck, Little Zoe's Take and Bake ie pizza, a number of unlicensed restaurants operating illegally, among other places, all in Keene, NH), I pay my employees in BitCoin, I buy my computers and electronics in BitCoin (Yes, in Keene, NH), I even pay for my haircut in BitCoin. Ohh did I mention I have car insurance I pay in BitCoin (inguard.com)!!!!
There are better options and solutions to the problems governments "solve". We just need to gather more like-minded people together in one place and seize the opportunities in solving them. We've got a good thing going here in Keene, New Hampshire (and pretty much everywhere else in New Hampshire with a population of any size). Now if you migrate here like I did you can help solve the problem of government using violence against non-violent people.
Springer tried, they failed. And the industry tries again.
I could be sympathetic to their cause if the goal was noble, and if the situation wasn't fair, but it isn't noble, and the situation is fair.
Google news makes money by using newspapers' snippets, and in exchange generates a lot of traffic to those newspapers. And it also features small papers and gives them a chance.
Big newspapers want to maximize their revenue by keeping their audience on their site and preventing them to go see their competitors' (that's why all of them have mobile applications that they try to make you install, that are simply a browser limited to their website, and why they all have dozens of links to their other articles everywhere on their pages).
If google news didn't exist, big papers would have nearly all the traffic, but google news direct some of the traffic toward smaller papers. That's a crime for them, that's lost money, and they want it back (and whether or not the additional traffic from google news outweights the one lost to smaller paper isn't considered at all).
But since they can't destroy google news nor leave it (all that traffic would go to smaller newspapers), they try to extort the money they think they lose to small papers, under the guise that google makes money off of them, because saying that google broke their monopoly would not be well received, even though that's the real reason.