Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
Of course they want Google to link to them! They also want Google to give them billions and billions of dollars, because, you know, those links are utterly priceless!
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is no EU proposal.
There is a bunch of media that want the EU to make a proposal.
Big difference!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That would be a blow to Google. Without good sources of news no one would go to google for news and they would loose traffic/ads/$$$. People would switch back to a couple online newspapers.
Right. But isn't this was robots.txt is for? Perhaps we need to update the RFC to indicate that the page(s) are okay for search results, but not okay for aggregators? Seems like a simple fix that doesn't involve lawyers.
Actually there is no need for that, google allows multiple ways to block or limit the search results these news organizations can display already. Google has their different crawlers listed on their support pages and also provides examples of how to block specific crawlers from indexing their sites or limit what is displayed. In addition they also support blocking via meta tags and even http headers. So if the news organizations wanted to show up in search results but not in google news they could easily set the following on the web server:
And just like that the news stories would not be indexed at all, or if they did not want snippets but just a normal link they could replace noindex with nosnippet and they would have blocked news snippets being shown site wide. With the solution to their woes being so simple I am not sure why they have not done it yet.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive