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Google and Facebook 'Must Pay For News' From Which They Make Billions (yahoo.com)
Internet giants such as Google and Facebook must pay copyright charges for using news content on their platforms, nine European press agencies said. These giant platforms, news agencies said, make vast profits from news content on their platforms. The call comes at a time when the EU is debating a directive to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to. From a report: "Facebook has become the biggest media in the world," the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde. "Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom... They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe's departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground." The agencies argued, "access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth."
Stop linking to any news from the group(s) that don't want them "making billions" by linking news articles.
Wonder how long those news agencies will take to change their minds?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What a concept!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Let those new outlets get their own clicks the hard way, instead of having FB and Google funnel people straight to them. Spoiler alert: I won't see their articles anymore.
Rule's always been: pay if you reprint. (See AP in the USA.). However, everyone's always been free to summarize and restate if they attribute, which is essentially what the link does.
"access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth."
Access to free information has been a great victory of the internet. It is not a myth. People expect money in return for what they give freely (bits landing on my computer). That's a myth.
"Custer" ring any bells? This didn't work out very well for Spain when they tried it guys.
This is a problem on all sides. On one hand, Yes, the producers need the funding to keep producing high quality -and very expensive- reporting. If Google and Facebook simply stop linking to actual news then the revenue those orgs depend on will dramatically decrease. Further, then the only "news" most people will see will be cheap opinion pieces. News orgs have long loved opinion editorials because they are really, really cheap to produce -and are really quite popular. If this goes through, then you will see investigative reporting drop even further.
so if they use short bit (like a headline, perhaps a condensed one; and a sentence or two either from the article or an original paraphrasing) then link to the actual source that bit came from, that should always be allowed....
but if they frame the entire article or a larger summary (one large enough to convey all the main information contained in the article) on their own site.. then nope. pay up, bitches.
Google is a search engine and Facebook a social media platform. If you don't want your news site to be indexed by Google take it off the public internet. If you don't want your news posted on Facebook then go after the users that post it on their feeds. Everyone thinks your news is fake and full of shit anyway so just die already. People are putting more trust in bloggers and crack pots like Alex Jones and The Young Turks. I see why, because even though they both lie, at least they are funny to watch.
The solution already exists, and is already in use.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If Google, Bing, FB and the rest are forced to pay for the news in the first place via their advertising dollars, then the link followed should always work and provide access to the complete text of the article they linked to. Drop the paywall for any reference from a search engine that has already paid for the content.
Just more fake news from the fake lame stream socialist media outlets. Trump will fix this for us. #MAGA
posturing about whose part "is worth less" is the norm. Like peering disputes among internet backbone providers.
And Google is not in a position to be bullied, here; news aggregation is not their sole profit center, far from it.
When a site such as MSN carries a news story - the whole text from perhaps the AP under an MSN link are they not paying for it at all? IS there some sort of revenue sharing from whatever ads are served up?
I would think just copying their entire articles without permission would clearly violate copyright and would have been shut down long ago if that were the case.
OTOH, if they're just linking to stories with only a sentence or two in a preview that seems like fair use to my untrained layman's eye. And besides, how else would some podunk newspaper halfway across the country get any hits if Google didn't find them for me?
FaceBook and Google have an easy response to this: they can change their algorithms to prefer news sources that don't ask them for money. In fact, if I were a state-run "news service" such as RT or Xinhua, I would charge FB and Google nothing, and immediately become the loudest voice in the room.
Finding God in a Dog
When I want news, I don't go to shit like the New York Times or Washington Post. I go to my RSS feeds for Slashdot or Ars Technica or SoylentNews or TorrentFreak or even run searches on Google News. I don't go to your publication, I go to aggregators and smaller news organizations that LEAD ME TO YOUR PUBLICATION. Now you want to charge them for leading me to you? Are you that incredibly stupid? That's like charging for access to your RSS feed. If that's the way you want to be, perhaps we should just let you stand alone in the middle of the goddamn internet desert waving your flag of "subscribe to me!" and see how long your business stays open.
The hubris is heavy with these retards. And why does shit like this always come from the EU? I swear, for all the guns, fat, and cheeseburgers we have here in 'Murica, we sure have a much better legal framework for things. France in particular mystifies me; their laws on several things such as photography are batshit insane.
I don't they understand how the internet works. The articles are not reprinted wholesale, only linked to. Facebook and Google make money as an aggregator, and then you go to the media's site and see the full article, and their advertising. Everyone advertises on their own platform.
As someone else noted, the American media largely understands how this works. The EU proposal is just some bizarre misguided rent seeking for the media industries there, which will end up blowing up in their own faces as they no longer receive the majority of their traffic.
Slashdot really seems to be the worse. They don't produce any news and often duplicate post it. They should get charged extra for the duplicate posts.
You mean operation northwoods and operation mockingbird?
The more "free" the online news, the more likely it is to be advertising and hype. But even paywalled news isn't worth it unless you're the sort of person who loves to spend money and pretend to be well read. If you look hard enough though, there is lots of good information placed on the web by very talented, knowledgeable people, and some of it even gets lots of google hits. And then there are codex-style books that are still relevant even if they are bulky and dusty.
Why don't the people that make news charge the ISP. Now that there are no Net Neutrality rules now you can try to squeeze out some euros from the ISPs. Or just better, why don't "news companies" get out of the Internet ?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
I remember the French speaking ones trying before and when they closed the news sites down the publishers saw sharp decline in news.
Kind of pathetic you've all lost the ability to think for yourselves.
Instead of "aggregating" the news, Google and FB could shift their model to "wrapping" the news, providing extended summaries with appropriate hyperlinks to the original sources. (Think of a long Slashdot summary in which the submitter worked particularly hard; that happened more in the old days than it does now).
These summaries could be generated by software.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
Belgium was the first country to try it, and Google responded by removing complaining publications from Google News. In response, the publications then complained that Google News was being mean to them, even though they were the ones complaining. In Germany, a similar thing happened, whereby Google left the complaining publications in Google News, but without snippets since that was a key aspect of the law. Again, the publishers screamed "unfair" even though they were the ones who had pushed for the law in the first place.
FTS: "They do not have . . . editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground"
Given the quality and bias of news that is passed on to the public, neither do these 'news' agencies.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Anew law was passed and then Google news shut down and news agencies got 0.
Then, they immediately bitched that the law should have said "you cannot shut down and you must pay". So the mask fell off. It was not about fairness, just about greed after all.
Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom
Don't start giving them ideas...
On the other side, If they built a newsroom, no idea how much would that cost, but anyway if they did, and then they linked preferentially to that news source, the same outlets to complain now for being linked, would be crying illegal monopoly at the top of their lungs, and demanding to be linked on equal standing.
I guess that the main lesson here is that seismic technological transitions always have somebody with the foot in the wrong place.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Useless whinning from dying dinossaurs.
I'm not completely unsympathetic to what they are saying, but the perspective is all wrong, and it's not all that dissimilar than the whole discussion about piracy. Pointing fingers at all the wrong places will lead you to no results.
See, no matter how much you cry about this, Facebook, Twitter and Google are not "stealing your content" themselves. It's the users. And no matter how hard you try, there are provisions in law that protects these platforms from their users actions. This won't change because there are far bigger things in play here than your news rooms financial needs.
There's no viable route where one of these social networks giants will say "fine, we'll pay you some ammount of money because people who uses our platforms keeps sharing your content".
Because if they open that Pandora's box, they'll also be taking responsibility for all the crap that is shared there. That's a whole other level of responsibility and liability that will be thrown against the companies to a point they won't be able to keep profitability anymore.
And do you really want to tie yourselves as employees of these corporations?
But much like piracy, the solution should be relatively easy to understand: you want your content to be monetized, you want to be compensated for it, you want a viable solution where your work is paid for - look at content creators that are not still living in the past.
What do YouTubers do? What newer platforms do? How are modern newsrooms sustaining themselves? How can you still make a profit when people are accessing your content without traditional methods of payment?
The answer is there.
These press agencies have got to stop displaying such an incredible ammount of ignorance about the platforms they are trying to get a foothold on, and hire people who can come up with ways of monetizing their content on web platforms. It isn't a secret, and it's pretty much everywhere these days.
I'm sorry if the Internet has changed the funding dynamics of traditional news, entertainment industry in general, and other stuff - but face reality and fall in. This whinning will result in nothing.
One of the things that people don't really know about how news is produced is that the large news outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox are just glorified middle men. All they do is collect reporting from local affiliates, the Associated Press, and other more independent journalist to create glorified talk shows where well polished pundits comment open it. It's been that way since the major TV networks began to hand their news gather wings over to the entertainment departments.
Only some of the things posted on Facebook are news articles. Only some of your search results on Google are from news sites. But Slashdot? Every single story here comes from horrible people stealing content from news agencies! For shame! Down with all news aggregation sites!
To my knowledge, there is no way to read a news article on either google or facebook. They link to the actual site where the news article exists. If anything, the news site should be paying google and facebook for giving the newspaper free advertisement. If they demand that google and facebook not link to them then they will just lose the free advertisement that google provides. There is nothing that prevents the newspapers from getting together and creating a better portal than news.google.com but that's all google does. The fact that google has a defacto monopoly and many people only read the summaries and not the actual article might be a problem but not really google's problem. The only two remedies that are likely to happen is either google delists your site or google stops displaying summaries of your article which is basically the same as delisting it.
They clearly don't understand were their traffic...aka revenue...is coming from.
So if I blog post risking my life climbing a high mountain then google should be force to pay me money just because they posted snipped of my blog in the search result?
Also are they saying EU people are all getting their news through snipped and no one bother to click on the link to read the detail? I don't remember the last I didn't click on a link that didn't peak my interest
'access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth' Wait what? What are they smoking on? Take away their internet and see how they feel then.
If that were true, then you would probably be able to provide an example, of an article or a news story on Facebook. You know, a single fucking example, just one of them publishing something. Something. Anything. One story.
This should be ridiculously easy.
Alas, though I swear I really have used Facebook, I have never ever personally seen any "content" over there. I don't mean original content; some ripped-off content would qualify too.
I think these people are totally nuts, calling Facebook a media company, with the implication that "media company" means anything at all like other media companies. Sure, they're making money off the news, but so is the airline that sells plane tickets to reporters. So is the ink manufacturer, for a newspaper. So is the landlord for the building they work in.
SEO the shit out of a website. Burry all github/sourceforge/codeplex results. Charge money to access all GPL'd projects from github.
I have no idea about Facebook because I don't use it, but Google does show adverts around the news they link. They likely analyse the content of the article they link to show relevant adverts. In other words, Google does make money from the news agencies (I'm guessing the same applies to Facebook...?).
Which, I guess, is the same that happens with their users. Google make money, quite a bit, out of their users and they only offer free access to their search engine in return (which they use to generate more data to sell more). The users seem to be quite happy with that deal, but the agencies are not.
So can Google follow German case just delist all EU news and only display other countries news to EU people? Is there EU law preventing them delisting? I just don't see how you can force Google to pay to display search result?
They are just begging for the Google and Facebook monopolies to put them out of business. All Google and Facebook have to do is threaten to open up massive news operations with field reporters for a community news portals on their site for each city and country (without aggregated links from outsides news agencies).
If they did that it would be the end up these European press agencies. They should be thankful that these platform aggregate their links in this day and age.
I mean, didn't they try this years ago and google stopped listing them. Their traffice went down and they begged to get re-listed?
Oh here one for starters:
http://www.france24.com/en/201...
Furthermore, I think Facebook users, who are having their accounts and many other things scraped and datamined by Facebook every single day, should be paid for their data -- and don't tell me "they're being paid by being given free access to the site", because that's bullshit, what Facebook gets from it's users pays them orders of magnitude more than it costs to run the site, hence the huge amount of money Zuckerberg has. Facebook users should have an 'account' that shows them exactly how much money they've accrued from Facebook as compensation for their privacy being invaded, which can be withdrawn at any time, or allowed to accumulate and paid interest at the going rate for a typical savings account at a bank. It's not like there isn't precedent for this; don't people on YouTube get money from advertising clicks? Not much different.
>everyone's always been free to summarize and restate if they attribute
I imagine it wouldn't take Google long to hack together something that would not only gather news, but summarize it, tag it with an attribution, and then put 'GoogleNewsAI' in the byline.
Hell, they could probably manage to link it to a GIS to pull up a relevant licence-free image, too.
... may take care of this.
Limiting access works many ways.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
What do YouTubers do?
Until recently, they used to have YouTube place preroll ads on their videos. But that's less effective now that YouTube is enforcing stricter standards on what material in videos is "advertiser friendly".
I assume any and all news I find on Facebook to be fake unless proven otherwise.
In other words... I don't get my news from Facebook.
Please bring me free dinner oh and yes, you must pay me for the privilege.
It seems that the value that Google or Slashdot are providing is finding content and/or allowing discussion about the content.
All right then, If they have to pay for news stories, then they should get refunds for fake news. How about any day they have fake news from a news source, they don't have to pay for ANY news from that source for that day. They ( Faceboob and Google ) would have an incentive to determine what news is fake and label it so on their sites, and the news sources would also have an incentive to verify news before they post it so as not to be caught and penalised. 2 birds with one stone. Too bad the politicos would never think of this.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
All US tech companies should stop doing business in the UK.
UK is just spoiled brats.
I would love to see what comes next, but I'll be dead.
Is it good for healthy societies to have one or two giant for-profit companies controlling most of the news people see?
No but that's hardly some new problem. Currently there are about 6 companies" that control roughly 90% of the media. It is these companies that are funding opposition to net neutrality since they own much of the content and distribution.
Google if anything is something of a disruptive influence.
We need to find a way to fund them collectively. If not, trolls will own the elections.
Google and Facebook are effectively monopolies. Might as well formally recognize that status and use the monopoly regulation tools to find some sort of funding to the news papers. It is not a great solution, not even a good solution. But it is still better than the alternative, direct government subsidy from tax payers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seriously, if Google, FB, Twitter, MS, etc got together and put up a NEUTRAL news agency (i.e. no political agenda), and then went around the globe like Reuters does, they could do some major good. Ideally, have them buy faux news and make them quit with fake news.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
as they will be able to do easily in the near future,
by understanding the meaning and then paraphrasing it using different sentence construction,
that is NOT copyright infringement, since it is not the meaning that copyright applies to, but the specific expression.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
VAST, vast profits. Mini Me fetch the motor we're going to the bank!
I went to news.google.com 10 seconds ago. I didn't see one advertisement.
I don't see how Google makes any money off its news aggregation---they're doing it for free it seems.
They're making money in many other businesses but not news and the newspapers want some of it.
I have no problem with a company showing links and titles to other sites as long as there are no advertisement (paid or unpaid) and no paid content on the same display or page or view.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/12/14/2055231/eff-accessing-publicly-available-information-on-the-internet-is-not-a-crime
Stop whining!
I wonder how much those news agencies pay for their newswire and AP content.
Be a shame if something was to happen to it....
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Google makes money from ads when you search, but the new site will make money from ads when Google sends users to them. So Google should be getting a cut from the news sites actually. Google will simply pull those news sites out of the search engine and watch them tank.
And internet advertising isn't paying for it. The utopia of free didn't give us a sensible net where the truth rises to the top.
What is the actual problem here?
> "Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom... They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe's departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground."
This sounds dangerously close to when software companies would whine about open source giving away for free software that does something they want to sell. Given how much misinformation there is in media publications it's quite apparent that they don't have any of those things they claim they have. They might have people in those places but that's very little in the way of checks and verification at any stage in modern media. Everything all the way from source to write up to even the choice to publish is corrupted.
> "Internet users would not be touched... simply those who now pocket a disproportionate part of advertising revenue would have to share a significant part of it with those who actually produce the information" on which the money is made.
This isn't the most unreasonable thing to consider in the universe, or at least it wouldn't be if they actually specifically explained what their problem is.
No one would watch or read it. Same as you. You have your ideas no matter how silly, and ignore anything that doesn't conform to them. Most people like their bubbles and keep watching/listening/reading the things they already agree with.
How else could you explain your constant anti-China gibberish?
Except CO2, that isn't made from people but $ and GDP, windbourne told me.
I also fully believe that other organizations that use other sources of information, like "reshareworthy" et al, should be opening up their wallets as well. They monetize via annoying, intrusive ads while often including external content they did not produce.