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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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Exactly this. Seems to me I read that the Spanish news print media were on their hands and knees begging for links to their news web sites. Can't remember how it turned out. German sites were also in a similar situation IIRC.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
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 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.
While that's true for the news sites, it's also true for Google as well. If Google can turn traffic into profits, the news sites should be able to as well.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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.
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.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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?
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 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.
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.