EU Copyright Reform Proposes Search Engines Pay For Snippets (thestack.com) 172
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."
good luck with that one... (Score:1)
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.
Re:good luck with that one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does "copyright reform" always mean increasing copyright, either what it protects or overall term. never a reduced term or increased "fair use".
Re:good luck with that one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because you don't pay enough to buy the laws you want.
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Like it or not: the money that does buy laws that the recording industry wants, ultimately comes from us, consumers. So perhaps we shouldn't be buying DVD's etc, but use that money to buy politicians ourselves? Anyone for some crowdfunding actions? ;-)
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Buying laws only works because people fall for politicians' campaigning. Ultimately only the voters control who gets to make the laws, but as long as those voters pay as little attention to who they are electing as we (collectively) often do and believe the special-interest-funded campaigning as much as we (collectively) often do, the rot will continue.
Unfortunately, copyright is one of those issues that is just not that interesting to most people, as long as they can carry on ripping Game of Thrones and sh
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The real problem is that we can't "you don't represent me" them when they start acting objectionably. Once they get elected, the control is over until the next cycle.
One possible way to combat this would be to make the votes that a politician can wield proportional to the number of people currently signed on to him rather than to someone else...and to make it easy to switch your vote to someone else within, say, half an hour. This has a lot of problems with potential voter fraud, but it would let people d
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Well, I'm with you on that principle as well. I can't see how an alternative scheme such as you suggested could be workable in practice, but if you had proposed some reasonable power of recall I would probably have agreed.
Still, even without that, it helps if we at least elect people who might act in our interests in the first place. Until money is an acceptable substitute for votes, the voters still have all the power on that one if they only choose to use it.
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Or gets extorted from businesses by their legally-enshrined shakedown mobs.
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And then CD/DVD/etc sales will drop, the industry will claim that this is due to piracy, and will call for harsher laws.
Or, more realistically, a big boycott will be called for, few will participate, and the industry won't even notice as they roll on by.
Re:good luck with that one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does "copyright reform" always mean increasing copyright
It doesn't. Around two years ago, the UK government passed a law that created a private copying exception, thus finally legalising things like format shifting or using cloud services as long as someone had a legitimate personal copy and it was not being shared around.
Of course, less than a year later, that law was struck down after a judicial review, because EU.
And that wasn't an isolated incident, as we see here. The EU is fast turning into global enemy #1 for progressive copyright reform. It's a huge supporter of big rightsholders at the expense of everyone else.
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You want Brexit? Because this is how you get Brexit...
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Well, yes. The official campaigns argued as if Brexit was only about immigration and the economy, but in reality I suspect a lot of people voted to leave on the basis of democratic deficit and sovereignty arguments, a belief that the EU shouldn't be used to override national laws in this way. And frankly, in this specific context, I think they are right.
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because EU.
No, not "because EU". Only one of the claimants' several arguments concerned EU law. What the judge called "Issue VI" -- which was "Does the introduction of Section 28B constitute unlawful State aid within the meaning of Article 107 TFEU which was not notified to the Commission under Article 108(3) TFEU and so is unlawful?".
And that argument failed. Paragraph 302, onwards: https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/w... [judiciary.gov.uk]
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Yes, because EU. The entire basis for this disagreement was whether or not the UK government was allowed to introduce a private copying exception of the form that it did given the EU rules. If the government were not constrained by the EU Directive, all the questions about whether any harm was de minimis and pricing-in and so on would be moot.
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It's a complicated relationship, with pros and cons. Certainly a lot of things get blamed on the EU without any rational justification. On the other hand, plenty of things also get blamed on the EU with some rational justification. There is one particularly evil political technique where something that would never get passed back home gets punted to the EU where it's relatively out of sight, and then comes back usually via a Directive a couple of years later, at which time the government can not only claim
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So the cause of these issues is poor local governance using the EU as a tool to subvert their electorate's wishes?
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I'm not sure which specific issues you mean, but yes, using the EU to achieve political goals against the wishes of the electorate is exactly what happens sometimes.
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It remains the case that the law was brought down because of arguments about incompatibility with the current EU rules. Had those EU rules not applied, there would have been no basis for the issues raised in the judicial review. The legal technicalities of the judicial review process don't change that fundamental situation, nor does the lack (so far) of a CJEU reference.
Also yes, lots of other Member States have private copying exceptions, but most of them caved to industry pressure and introduced some sort
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"Fair Use" has much more protection in the US. Many other countries (Japan, and many EU countries) either don't have a concept for fair use, or it's very limited.
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Sorry, but "fair use" within the US only works as a defense if the court agrees with you. Which means you've got to pay for a lawsuit, and you don't get the money back even if you win.
Also, "fair use" within the US is not well-defined, so trying that as your defense is always a crap-shoot (admittedly some cases are clearer than other, but even one measure of music has been found to not fall under fair use).
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Besides, how many of those "news" sites actually try to search-engine optimize? If they didn't want to be crawled, they could correctly implement a robots.txt file, hide behind a paywall, or make it generally difficult to crawl.
This is just a lobbyist earning his supper, trying to move money from
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Yeah precisely. I think they have the mistaken impression they're in a position to negotiate.
Google's reply? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.)
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Re:Google's reply? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The EU could declare it discriminitory to exclude those sites and impose fines or whatever else is necessary.
Which should get overturned as not wanting to pay for something you don't want can hardly be called discriminatory. In other words, it is not discrimination, in the evil sense, to decline services because you don't wanna pay their fee.
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Nope, they've requested they not be listed.
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I imagine Google has little love for the EU right now. That European search industry will now be able to flourish right?
Re:Google's reply? (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not talking about delisting a continent, only its media outlets. I can't think of anything more devastating.
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The news sites really, really don't get it, do they?
Google made Google News and gets revenue from including snippets. They think they should get some of that revenue because they provide the content. Perfectly reasonable until you remember that most of that content is a generic commodity. Other sites provide equally good snippets for all news stories.
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Reasonable or not reasonable doesn't even enter the equation, Google got them by the balls. You hand out your snippets for free or nobody will see your page.
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Google got them by the balls. You hand out your snippets for free or nobody will see your page.
Maybe, but I'm not sure the news businesses don't have a point on this one.
News is very much about the headlines and near real time information. There are lots of real people doing real work to generate that information stream for readers/viewers, both at the news outlets themselves and via the agencies that are in turn paid substantial amounts of money by the news outlets. There is definitely a reasonable argument that automatically scraping the key information to republish on other sites is not transforma
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This is why the news sites are a load of piss.
If they had actual well-informed, readable articles for people with more attention span than a goldfish, people might value them more than snippets, but since snippets is all they have, they are reaping the consequences.
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The better news sites do provide more detailed and well-informed content. Unfortunately, it turns out that many of their readers still have the attention span of a goldfish, and thus that their headlines and early commentary are disproportionately valuable to those readers, regardless of the quality or quantity of the additional work from the news reporters.
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f they all banded together and started marking their robots.txt files
THIS is the issue. If they wanted to not be listed by Google, there are existing mechanisms for this WHICH ACTUALLY WORK. This entire conversation is about "Google is making tons of money, and we are a dying breed, so instead of revitalizing our entire industry we're going to BLAME ONE SINGLE COMPANY and then try to extort billions of dollars from them." Seriously folks, if you *really* think you don't gain anything from Google indexing your content and flashing snippets at people then USE ROBOTS.TXT If
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This is also a fair point. Even if it is legally up to the publishers to decide whether they are willing to allow others to reproduce that part of their content, it's their own problem if they make the wrong decision and it costs them. That's just business.
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I agree it's unfortunate that so many people just rely on headlines, and that those headlines are sometimes less than perfect, but that's just the reality of what happens. Did you hear the one about the Slashdotter who actually read TFA before commenting?
So as long as that remains the reality, news organisations could plausibly be losing a significant amount of the value of their work if others are allowed to literally copy and paste the headlines and maybe some introductory snippets and republish them with
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No, but Google is where people go if they want to find something, and of course that also means that this is where people go for news. Unless news outlets agree to dump Google people will find what they're looking for and not bother looking for the one news outlet that decided to not cave in.
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It's not that they're a monopoly, although they are, it's that they are a natural monopoly, which doesn't require government interference to exist (as a monopoly). If it did, then Bing would be the dominant search engine.
Now there are generally many possible sources for any news story, and Google can choose whichever it wants to choose. If it has to pay it would probably pick AP, Reuters, maybe a couple of others and ignore the rest. Whoops! There go the local news sites. How many people will go to a s
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Anyone else in the search business will have the same incentive Google does to never spider a European news site.
Content (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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We're not talking about delisting a continent, only its media outlets. I can't think of anything more devastating.
I can think of one thing: Alphabet buys several small media outlets around the world, aggregates it all, makes it free for anyone to use and effectively makes the existing media outlet sites irrelevant.
I would love to see the look on their faces when they heard everyone was still getting news, just not from them.
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A search engine could provide links to a news item without showing any of the content. Of course, that will heavily devalue the news item in question, but if the EU insists on trying to destroy any notion of fair use, there will be inevitable casualties.
Maybe Google could just pay for the rights to access AP, Reuters and the other news wires, and then just say "Fuck it" to the news publishers, much of their content coming from exactly the same sources.
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More like "well, it turns out that it's gotten too expensive to send you traffic for free, so we're gonna have to start charging by the click. But don't worry, we'll just take it out of what we owe you for using your content..."
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Why would they bother? Most "news sources" aren't news originators even at a local level, so just deal directly with the sources, and if the "news sources" want to get back on, charge them for the privilege (plus requiring some rather explicit legal terns).
That sounds a lot easier, and legally safer.
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To break the argument.
These sorts of laws are based on the premise that Google is taking something for free and the news sources get nothing back. That's obviously a false premise, but that doesn't seem to be getting through to the people that matter and even making an example of entire countries doesn't seem to be enough to make the problem go away.
So, play hardball; if the news sources think their content is worth something, maybe Google's aggregation and traffic services should be w
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Well, that raises an interesting question... if the information in an article is so lean that a computer algorithm can boil it down into a trivial amount of text, then is the article really a creative work that's worthy of copyright protection? And would Google's algorithm be considered a transformative fair use (or fair dealing, or whatever the EU standard is)?
Many reform proposals (Score:1)
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Alternatively Google and Microsoft will start using their paraphrasing engines to sidestep the copyrights entirely. Copyright is a restriction on a verbatim copy of the original, so their algorithms just need to change a bit here and there while still keeping the gist, and then they win for free.
paraphrasing engine (Score:2)
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That worked great in Germany (Score:1)
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...
Re:That worked great in Germany (Score:4, Informative)
Re:That worked great in Germany (Score:5, Informative)
This is a leaked draft impact assessment [statewatch.org](PDF alert), you can read more about it here: European Copyright Leak Exposes Plans to Force the Internet to Subsidize Publishers [eff.org]
This is what Julia Reda (MEP) says about it: Commissioner Oettinger is about to turn EU copyright reform into another ACTA [juliareda.eu]:
Where does it say... (Score:2)
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?
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Fact-checking is -- well, should be -- anisotropic.)
Heh... Make that isotropic.
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"then Google is paying those news websites for the right to use the content so indexed."
No. The papers gave google a free licence to publish the snippets.
Motivation? (Score:3)
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.
Goodbye newspapers (Score:2)
They'll just remove the newspapers from search results, just like the other umpteen times it was tried.
there no cure for morons (Score:3)
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.
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how about looking at it from another angle (Score:2)
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I, personally, found the web much more useful before it was polluted with the kind of stuff that most commercial sites, explicitly including "news organizations", include.
It's true, in those days I searched using boolean patterns, but without all the extraneous noise I got better answers than I do now with highly refined search engines.
What will the news orgs pay out? (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Let's cement Googles monopoly (Score:3)
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.
New robots field? (Score:2)
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?
Very funny (Score:2)
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.
This should read: (Score:2)
"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.
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I manage to read news every day without Google's help. In fact I never use Google when in search of news. I go direct to news sites.
If one organisation disappears from Google because of a paywall then readers will go elsewhere, to one that isn't.
But when every news organisation in your country is not indexed by Google, what will you do? Just read news about America and elsewhere? No, you'll go direct to the news websites.
Remember that if publishers died and produced nothing then Google would have nothing to
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If ALL publishers died, then Google would have nothing to index. They astounding thing to note is that the publishers got their "lex Google" in Germany, and they've already caved and given Google a free exemption, so this isn't going to hurt Google, just other search engines. Instead of limiting Google's power over their business, they have increased it. And they STILL keep pushing for this on a larger scale. I'm sincerely convinced that getting an MBA rots people's brains. There is no other reasonable expl
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Except, they will get the news.
From American sources. Or Canadian sources. And so on.
The internet is global. Deal with it.
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And from European news you don't usually get the American angle. It's good to read both to understand both sides of the coin.
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There is not much difference between the European angle and the American angle.
You're only thinking about European-English news now. There's plenty of difference in the general European and American angle. I read Swedish, Finnish, German and British news quite often and the contrast with American news is yuuge.
The news sites you mentioned give other angles, yes, but the OP mentioned not getting European news from American sources, hence the vice versa reference.
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What made you think I was thinking about "European-English" news only?
Because that's the only way your argument would have made even some sense to me. I can hardly relate to what you said otherwise. When I read Swedish news and compare them to just about any news outlet in the US, the difference in standpoints in reporting is extremely visible. Even the most liberal ones in the US seem like right-wing publications when you compare them to left-leaning Swedish counterparts.
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Besides, going with US (or other external) sources isn't a defense. You can still be sued to pay them. The actual defense is to go to the wire services and pay them, and I'm rather sure they provide translations in most European languages. (For the rest, work on improving Bablefish.)
Re:Death to publishers (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds like Spain tried to do this almost verbatim:
source: [thestack.com] [thestack.com]
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"Oh, and you are obliged to advertise our business"
Patently absurd when applied to any business, except publishing apparently. It's a brilliant plan, really. The EU values a healthy, independent press. Even though I use the term independent very lightly, it wouldn't be good if government were seen to subsidise the perss directly. So instead they give them the power to tax private parties with deep pockets.
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No, but you are required to wear clothing, and people who sell it to you can set their price.
The difference is that selling clothing isn't a natural monopoly, and has only minor network effects.
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Well of course Google News makes money for Google.
They wouldn't run that service if it didn't.
The content providers get their share when they provide news that people want to read (i.e. click through to).
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Small snippets are not considered copyright infringment.
That's not entirely accurate. For example, here in the UK, there is no specific minimum amount of material that has to be copied before copyright is infringed. Any work significant enough to be subject to copyright protection in the first place is also potentially subject to infringement.
As an aside, the AC you replied to was overstating the position of US fair use law as well. The amount of the work being copied is only one of the four factors that determine fair use, and again there is no specific minimum
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It would be fair use only if used infrequently. For example, if you want to quote someone else's article in your article, that's fair use. However, if your entire business is dependent upon making snippets from thousands of articles, that's no longer fair use, it's commercial use.
No, you're wrong.
First, fair use applies to both commercial and non-commercial uses. For example, when Mad Magazine did a movie parody, that would be fair use, even though the magazine us sold for an increasing cheap price and is a commercial venture.
Second, the previous poster didn't really explain it well. Fair use is when a copyrighted work is used without permission in a way that, but for fair use, would be infringing, but which is not infringing because it is in the general purpose of copyright to allo
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If I want local news, I'm going to the specific website of a local news outlet that I already know of.
If I want national news that the local site may not cover, I'm going to a specific national news website (or a Few to get alternate views).
If I want to research a specific current event topic and get as many relevant alternate sources as I can, I'm going to Google AND DuckDuckGo.
If I don't see a snippet of an article in the search results that gives an inkling that it contains information relevant to what I
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You're wrong, even though your conclusion is right.
Local news is important, but most "news sources" aren't sources, they repeat what the wire services send them. And Google can subscribe to the wire services for a lot less hassle than dealing with every local paper. And I rather expect that the wire services provide translated versions of the news into most European languages, so THAT's not a problem.
This might cause the wire services to devote more effort to local news, of course.
This is a structurally b
Re:Why is this bad?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me spell it out for you:
1. Google created and maintains at its own expense a mechanism for redirecting users to your site and Google doesn't charge you anything for it.
2. Now you're demanding that Google pay you for what you're already receiving at no charge to you.
If, given (1), it sounds like (2) is pretty fucked up, that's because it is.
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It's just like radio.
Sure, radio makes some money but they're really an advertising arm of the publishers. They expose people to things that they can then go and buy. They keep the publishers in business.
Some publishers even PAID for the privelege.
Google can just index everything else. They are the gateway for EVERYTHING, not just lame troll bait news organizations.
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Because this has little to nothing to do with rights (or even common sense), and everything to do with greed.
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Because robots.txt is only a standard, not a law.
There have been reports of Bing's web crawlers not respecting robots.txt - and Bing has a huge user base (whether you like it or not) and that's just at the top of the iceberg.
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The robots.txt is limited and should be expanded.
Along with Allow: and Disallow: it should have a Pay: for site admins to tell the crawlers what they have to pay before going through all content. Flag as Inappropriate
Because robots.txt is only a standard, not a law.
There have been reports of Bing's web crawlers not respecting robots.txt - and Bing has a huge user base (whether you like it or not) and that's just at the top of the iceberg.
Here is what I propose: Sites should make proper use of robots.txt. Sites should be able to sue search engines who index content which should be blocked based on robots.txt. Have something similar apply to sitemap.xml (do other search engines look at the sitemap?)