Meta Threatens To Yank News Content From California Over Payments Bill (reuters.com) 68
Meta announced that it would remove news content from its platform in California if the state government passes legislation requiring tech companies to pay publishers. Reuters reports: The proposed California Journalism Preservation Act would require "online platforms" to pay a "journalism usage fee" to news providers whose work appears on their services, aimed at reversing a decline in the local news sector. In a tweeted statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the payment structure a "slush fund" and said the bill would primarily benefit "big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers."
The statement was Meta's first on the California bill specifically, although the company has been waging similar battles over compensation for news publishers at the federal level and in countries outside the United States.
The statement was Meta's first on the California bill specifically, although the company has been waging similar battles over compensation for news publishers at the federal level and in countries outside the United States.
Oh, no. (Score:2, Insightful)
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oxymoron.
meta and news content in the same sentence.
i think it is hilarious.
but none of you are even smiling
That's a feature, actually! (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting news from Facebook is like subscribing to the propaganda service of your favorite dictatorship.
Re:That's a feature, actually! (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably more so now. All the garbage disinfo websites will happily smear their dogshit all over Facebook for free, and Facebook will let them.
Yup (Score:5, Informative)
although the company has been waging similar battles over compensation for news publishers at the federal level and in countries outside the United States.
Witness, Australia [bbc.com]. Both Facebook (now Meta) and Google must pay publishers for news content, among other things. This after both companies threatened to block news on their respective sites from Australia.
Re:Yup (Score:5, Informative)
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The Australian government learnt from Spain's mistakes. The trouble now is that the big Australian media companies are raking in money but smaller content producers get nothing. Also, the standard of journalism continues to fall.
Re:Yup (Score:4, Informative)
Even Google are only claiming that publishers lost 10% of their traffic, not "most": https://blog.google/products/n... [blog.google]
I couldn't find some independent figures in the 10 seconds I spent fact checking your claim, but publishers in Brazil who opted out of Google News reported a negligible decline in traffic. Both sources are unreliable, but it seems that the upper and lower bounds are 10% and 0%.
What we don't have stats for is discoverability. That is a particularly big deal for smaller publishers. Their stories get mixed in with the bigger publishers on Google News, helping people discover them.
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By the way, there's a name for what the news organizations are doing in California: it's called "Rent Seeking Behavior."
Rent Seeking, in a nutshell, is when one company (or group of companies) convinces the government to enact regulation that favors it or disfavors a competitor. Like a monopoly, it's a form of anti-competitive behavior which harms the consumer.
Whatever you may think of Facebook in general, the bottom line is that Meta is on the right side of this issue. The state has no business mandating r
Re:Yup (Score:4, Insightful)
By the way, there's a name for what the news organizations are doing in California: it's called "Rent Seeking Behavior."
There's a name for what the news organizations are asking for, but it's "wanting to get paid for the stuff that Google steals".
Google is not the good guy here.
Re:Yup (Score:4, Interesting)
Google is not the good guy here.
Neither are those who rely on Google for traffic, and then want the government create this bizarre legislative contract between Google and said clickbait generators.
So no, it's rent-seeking behavior. Clean-cut.
Whether Google is a good guy or a bad guy doesn't matter. It's entirely orthogonal to setting the precedent of the clickbait brigades getting the government to enforce anyone who may share knowledge of an article they publicly post.
I mean fuck, maybe we can extend this to its logical conclusion and get the legislature to force Apple to force $0.15 out of our Apple Wallet every time we share a story with someone over iMessage, to be delivered to the originator of that story.
The future's fucking bright. Thank you for contributing your ideas to it.
It's a fucking Strange New World.
That was then [Re:Yup] (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is not the good guy here.
Neither are those who rely on Google for traffic,
It's true that Google used to be a search engine that directed traffic to your site. But that was then. This is now.
Google now just takes the text it finds on your site and gives it to the searcher, no need to go to your site at all.
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Google does nothing but provider a headline, a link, and a snipped.
But that's cool that you think that justifies using the government to enforce payment to a cartel of companies that wrote those 36 or so words.
I can't wait until they come for you
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The need is up to the consumer. Google does nothing but provider a headline, a link, and a snipped.
The headline is ok. The link is ok. I'm not sure what a snipped is, but if you mean "they copy the relevant text of the article so you don't have to click the link and you get what you need without leaving Google," that is not ok. That is copying somebody else's property, and they should pay for it.
But that's cool that you think that justifies using the government to enforce payment to a cartel of companies that wrote those 36 or so words.
What is new about the government making stealing things illegal?
...Oh, god, you're one of those "information wants to be free" guys, aren't you? Guys who think writers shouldn't be paid.
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The headline is ok. The link is ok. I'm not sure what a snipped is, but if you mean "they copy the relevant text of the article so you don't have to click the link and you get what you need without leaving Google," that is not ok. That is copying somebody else's property, and they should pay for it.
Snipped = obvious (to me) mistyping of "snippet"
How is that not OK?
That article provider allows any other random person off the internet to do precisely that.
What is new about the government making stealing things illegal?
What a loaded statement, lol.
stealing (n):
the action or offense of taking another person's property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft.
You cannot steal someone's text that they copied, and then sent to you digitally.
You cannot steal that which is intangible.
We can discuss if this is copyright infringeme
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The idea of posting text was that people come to your site to read it.
If they are stealing it and not sending people to your site, they should pay for it.
I'm not sure why that's hard to understand.
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The idea of posting text was that people come to your site to read it.
Let us handle this in a standard legal fashion. Create some tests to determine if it is warranted that Google should be treated differently than some rando.
Can a random person replicate the behavior of the Google News Snippet puller?
When a random person operates this Snippet puller, does it then deprive owner of said snippet of said snippet?
I'm not sure why that's hard to understand.
For a couple reasons. 1) You're misusing the word stealing in an attempt to make what is happening sound like a crime that it is not. You want to evoke an emotional re
Not fair use [Re:That was then [Re:Yup]] (Score:2)
Here is the fundamental: writers should be paid for their work. You are advocating the Google should be able to use the work of others for free.
Your argument is basically saying that if any person can get the work without paying, then Google should be able to grab as much of it as they want and distribute it to as many million users as they choose. No. One person reading an article personally is not the same as a billion-dollar company saying "we can take whatever we want for free."
Addressing just your las
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So legalistically, this is all bullshit.
No, you literally made my point.
That this is a fair use question.
The only thing you can be sure of if someone makes information freely available via the web is that, without a license explaining otherwise, you have permission to visit that website and read the article. robots.txt not present or present with very liberal settings (or whatever the new robots.txt header line is)? Well, if you scrape the website for your search engine index and then don't share the contents of the index (but do allow searches to find the original website) then given convention, you probably have implied permission.
Utter horse shit.
Better not tell the wayback machine.
But outside of those two situations, you really can't just say "Oh it's on a website that doesn't require a login, therefore I can copy and paste whatever I want or use an LM to transform it into text that means the same thing and distribute it across the world." There's no license to do that, and it's not normally "fair use" given the market impact.
Oh, that's just flat out fucking wrong, lol.
Let's not tell wayback machine, though.
And quite right too. We do, actually, want news organizations to publish the news on the web. We do actually want them to have incentives to fund journalism. Google (and Facebook, to bring this back on topic) doing more than providing links and the summary the HTML page explicitly states is the summary for search engine use is basically helping kill journalism, outside of clickbait Buzzfeed type crap and billionare/state funded propaganda.
Oh, fuck off.
Your stupid fucking reasoning is what's killing journalism. People are getting too fucking stupid to read it, and you're demonstrating that perfectly.
The law requires someone (but only if this someone has more than 50M MAU) who copies information from your website to be notified by said webs
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Here is the fundamental: writers should be paid for their work. You are advocating the Google should be able to use the work of others for free.
And you're a liar, because I advocated for no such specific thing.
If the base principles I am applying have that as an aftereffect, that's one thing. But to claim I'm "advocating for... X" when in fact I'm saying, "You must apply principle Y fairly", is use of the slippery slope fallacy.
Your argument is basically saying that if any person can get the work without paying, then Google should be able to grab as much of it as they want and distribute it to as many million users as they choose. No. One person reading an article personally is not the same as a billion-dollar company saying "we can take whatever we want for free."
Nonsense. I said it's a copyright issue.
Ultimately, you should know that fair use is defined in the law, and you aren't allowed to just make up what it means. The first of the earmarks of fair use is "Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes." Google (or "Alphabet") has 282 billion dollars of revenue per year. Damn right they are using it for commercial use. No, this is not fair use.
Ding ding ding!
The only portion of fair use this potentially flies in the face of is the fact that Google undoubtedly profits from it.
Otherwise, The Internet Archive, and you your
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I've already addressed your arguments, and see little point in repeating them. However:
The only portion of fair use this potentially flies in the face of is the fact that Google undoubtedly profits from it.
Correct. It's not fair use.
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I've already addressed your arguments, and see little point in repeating them. However:
You have failed to, you mean, and I agree. There's little point in failing more.
Correct. It's not fair use.
Wait... you think you can't profit off of fair use?
Christ. You just never get tired of being wrong.
Profit is a calculation in fair use. But you can absolutely profit off of fair use.
See: Libraries, News organizations themselves, etc.
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I disagree with your arguments for reasons I've already stated. You have said nothing new.
Bye.
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They literally give a simple method to stop engines like Google from even indexing the content, much less copying and sharing text.
The only reason not to do that is because they want the benefit of Google serving up their page as a result. They want something from Google, which they're getting, and now they're trying to double-dip and act like the main driver of traffic to their own site isn't the peopl
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I mean fuck, maybe we can extend this to its logical conclusion and get the legislature to force Apple to force $0.15 out of our Apple Wallet every time we share a story with someone over iMessage, to be delivered to the originator of that story.
That's called a slippery slope fallacy. Precisely no one here is talking about sharing a link to a story. The core issue is that the likes of Facebook and Google take enough of the story to prevent people every needing to go to the news site. Honestly Slashdot is not that much different. Be honest, did you RTFA? If not, then that's precisely the issue being discussed here.
This isn't rent seeking in the classical sense.
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That's called a slippery slope fallacy.
It's not.
It's related, but not quite the same.
One is not asserting that the slippery slope will happen.
This is what is called a slippery slope argument, without employing the fallacy- as the fallacy is asserting that the end result will happen. I am asserting that it must not be allowed to.
But our entire system of constitutional protections is based on slippery slope arguments.
Precisely no one here is talking about sharing a link to a story.
And yet, if the Government is empowered to do this, they're empowered to do that.
Back to the idea of constitutional protection
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However, even if I had not, TFA was dumb enough to send those bytes to those they expected to aggregate that content.
You cannot expect a proposal to not be boiled down to the principles that allow for it, and then extrapolating where such principles can lead.
That is the very height of reckless government.
To quote Edmund Burke,
He has heard, as well as I, that when great honours and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government. If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.
The here he refers to are the US colonies, in rebellion against England for acts which they consider intolerable, that they then proceeded to make sure co
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it's "wanting to get paid for the stuff that Google steals".
Last I checked, Google respects the robots.txt file. Perhaps Google inclusion should be opt-in instead of opt-out but either way the choice belongs to the web site operator. Google offers the choice of allowing it to include your site in its results (including the snippets they store) or disallowing it.
The state wishes to supplant that process with a scheme where not only can the web site demand Google to include their content, they can compel Google to pay for it as well. That's just wrong.
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The state wishes to supplant that process with a scheme where not only can the web site demand Google to include their content, they can compel Google to pay for it as well. That's just wrong.
Bingo.
We're only toying with the idea because let the fact that Google is the victim of the action distract us from the fact that a cartel of clickbait^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hontent providers have convinced the government to enforce a contract that Google never had any interest in becoming party to.
If it were some guys blog, or your text messages, one would feel otherwise. But we as Americans have become notoriously fucking bad at understanding why the government must be barred from certain actions.
If they can
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The state has no business mandating royalty payments for content Facebook hasn't even asked for.
Then why is Facebook republishing this information?
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Then why is Facebook republishing this information?
They're not. Facebook *users* are posting links to the news sites in their feeds and, like Google, Facebook includes a short blurb that it retrieves from the link.
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To be fair Facebook did block news as part of the negoitaion over the bill.
The big thing being two parts:
1)If you cover news you must include all news services (I.e You must include Newscorpe news)
2)News is defined as any information of a local,national or international importance (I.e If a company advertsises a sale then that is news)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
"We find this mildly useful to have on our website but it doesn't provide enough value that it would be worth paying any extra money to have."
I don't see that as an unreasonable position.
Re:These are always weird threats (Score:5, Interesting)
"We find this mildly useful to have on our website but it doesn't provide enough value that it would be worth paying any extra money to have."
I don't see that as an unreasonable position.
The point is that the volume of their response is out of proportion to the ide that it is "mildly useful". If it was mildly useful, they wouldn't be jumping up and down and yelling about how awful this law is. They would just quietly reevaluate their position and decide whether to pay or go home.
I assess it is much more likely they find it very useful, and lucrative, to have free news and are jumping up and down because the gravy train is in danger of drying up.
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If it was mildly useful,
"Useful" is a relative definition. What's useful to me isn't necessarily useful to you.
they wouldn't be jumping up and down and yelling about how awful this law is. They would just quietly reevaluate their position and decide whether to pay or go home.
So you get to unilaterally decide what's "useful" to others and what their response "should" be? Hmm.... That sounds awfully familiar.... Just where have I heard a similar argument on this page???? /s
I assess it is much more likely they find it very useful, and lucrative, to have free news and are jumping up and down because the gravy train is in danger of drying up.
Citation Needed. What's the basis for that assessment?
The point is that the volume of their response is out of proportion
The only thing "out of proportion" here is the idea that people should be forced to pay for something that was given away for free. If you don't want others quoting yo
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But jumping up and down saying "This is worth more to you than it is to us! We're going to take our ball home! Just you watch!" is fucking dumb,
This may be dumb, but in case you haven't noticed yet, is the SOP for how American companies operating in other countries, and only a handful of countries are strong enough to fight back.
FB is just using what is tried-and-true elsewhere back to America.
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We defeated a fascist. But we still have to defeat fascism.
I find that post so utterly ironic given what you call for in the post above.
If this is a copyright issue, then solve it in court.
But that's the problem, right? It's not quite a copyright issue, which is why we (who the fuck IS we here, the news lobby?) want to legislatively enforce contracted payment.
All fine and dandy when it's aimed at Meta, because they're a megacorp. Less funny when it's aimed at Joe's blog.
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Either get rid of your news sections, or pay for journalism.
Am I the only one that finds it ironic that you're pushing your stance of removing links to other news articles that aren't paid for, in the comment section of a linked to news article that wasn't paid for?
If you were to get your wish, and slashdot removed its news section (aka close down slashdot), there would be no place for you to post your comment.
If you have no place to post your comment, you couldn't push your stance that links to news must be paid for.
You claim you want no where to post your opinion.
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Why bother threatening in the first place? Either negotiate prices
You wouldn't know negotiating if it bit you on the ass. This is negotiation of prices.
Who needs news when we got TikTok? (Score:2)
Much more interesting things going on there compared to all the manipulated fake news from fake news outlets like CNN.
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Much more interesting things going on there compared to all the manipulated fake news from fake news outlets like CNN.
Yes! I rely on trusted sources like Fox News! They would never lie. Even if they privately say they do, over and over again. That was obviously just kidding around, so just ignore that.
Only if` (Score:2)
Wait? (Score:2)
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Heh. There is no news in California (or anywhere else), only propaganda and advertising.
Re: Wait? (Score:3, Insightful)
Request (Score:5, Interesting)
How do I request they "yank news content" from my region? Is there an official form I can fill out?
If Meta is against it (Score:4, Insightful)
, then we can be sure it is a good bill.
Anyone have a California-based VPN handy? (Score:4, Funny)
I'd like it for... reasons. Facebook reasons...
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You actually want to use facebook...for anything??? This bill is just about facebook news, you know, not facebook in general.
Is Facebook still a thing? (Score:2, Troll)
What if Meta not only stopped using news sources, but shut down accounts of all news orgs on Meta properties and California politicians that voted for the law including Newsom?
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They could just do a blanket ban of any content with "news" in it and Newsom would be covered by that.
Just Two Words From This Californian (Score:2)
Awesome (Score:2)
FB should never be considered a reliable news source, so this is a win for everyone.
The California Legislature Should Respond... (Score:1)
...by assessing an even higher tax on all advertising done on / by a social media company that specifically bans journalism (note: real journalism, not propaganda) from their platform.
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You neo-fascist fuckfaces are having fun with this now, but eventually the Court is going to say enough is enough with your thinly-veiled bills of attainder.
Zuck? Are you aware of a little tidbit here? (Score:2)
You can only threaten with something people are afraid of, not something people are desperately waiting for. That's like some politician threatening to step down from office when people run daily protests telling him to fuck off already.
Good. (Score:2)
Ooh that's some threat (Score:2)
"Don't pass this legislation or we might have to degrade our service to the point of irrelevance and lose a metric shit ton of engagement & profit rather than comply"
I've heard this before (Score:1)
Wall Street Journal nails it (Score:2)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/s... [wsj.com]
Regulators won’t let companies charge for growing risks.
State Farm can’t accurately price risk and increase its rates to cover ballooning liabilities. Other property and casualty insurers, including AIG and Chubb, have also been shrinking their California footprint after years of catastrophic wildfires, which are becoming more common owing to drought and decades of poor forest management.
Wildfires in 2017 and 2018 wiped out two times the underwriting profits that
Facebook has news????!! (Score:1)
Seriously, I'm a modest FB user and I have NEVER used it for news. It just always seemed like a bad idea from the start...