In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated.
In Spain, they went a bit further and wrote into the law that Google had to list news sites in their index. So Google News shut down in Spain. Law defeated.
I guess, third time’s the charm?
(or you can link and replace every snippet with 'censored by the EU' or something - might be a good strategy for raising awareness)
A better question is whether it's good for the user. Filter bubble, and all.
Exactly. But publishers still think they're in the 20th century
So Google has left the option that sites either give Google their content for free, and go out of business, or get delisted from search entirely, and go out of business.
https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... is a pretty good example of why this is happening.
The idea is to make it impossible to give Google a free license.
The best outcome would be if Google would refuse to link to any content of European publishers.
Not so much sure that's the "best" outcome as the only possible one. As rich as Google looks, when you start dividing their income by multiple multiplicative factors it doesn't last long; the log of Google's income isn't all that large.
On the other hand, Google definitely has a lot of cash to weather what to them will be at most a partial disruption of their money making system (as this is back in the linear domain rather than the log domain), whereas the online publications that get delisted from Google will be devastated.
I would predict with some confidence that if this does pass all the way into law in the EU that it would be unlikely to last very long as law. But it can cause a lot of damage in the meantime.
The difference this time, is that contracts with individual rights owners are specifically excluded.
So the fee is likely going to be an amount that Google can afford. But for the good of the Internet, it would be best if Google refuses and shows EU citizens that copyright has gone way beyond reasonable.
Isn't that because the music creator already entered an agreement with a rights organization? If the music creator didn't enter an agreement with a rights organization, the station would have to directly enter an agreement with the musician. The musician has the power to decide whether to sign with the organization or not.
Another thing rights organizations are notorious for are overbroad claims. They invert the burden of proof and require all performances to prove they are not playing licensed songs, and all music publishers to prove they are not publishing licensed songs. There is a lot of bureaucracy involved with this inverted burden of proof, which has no legal basis except that rights organizations can afford big legal bills and those on the other side mostly cannot.
I find this whole rights organization business to be nothing but a legalized racket.
or
I wanted to link this, but "BigMedia" want me to pay, so now I'm not even mentioning their title of the topic.
It's actually more damaging than that from the perspective of EU regulators: "I can't link to that Le Monde article, so here's a WaPo piece about the same subject".
Internet content delivery spans borders, by design. All this does is disadvantage the local producers and force their customer's eyeballs offshore.
Coupled with GDPR and many websites around the world shutting down or closing their doors to European users, there won't be many places to go.
The overarching trend of artificial borders on the internet is terrifying.
GDPR is a reasonably written attempt to preserve some measure of citizen privacy (i.e. you and me). It's an extension and continuation of Data Protection that's been there 20 years. Companies coped with no ill effect.
The copyright proposal is entirely for the benefit of large media companies, and the smell of lobbyists is overpowering. (i.e. not you and me)
That’s hyperbole. Most websites provenly don’t.
The GDPR is reasonable. This is not.
No need to conflate them.
Law is not defeated.
It means that Google, due to its market power, got the clips for free. Everyone else might be asked to pay.
It's actually anticompetitive.
I totally understand the intention behind it - you see what the death of good media and rise of clickbait/shill articles did to US and UK. The other EU governments are terrified their own information landscape might go similarly downhill - and all you have left is spam, lies, propaganda and corporate ads hidden as articles.
It's just that the approach taken here is the wrong one. They are trying to fix something but shoot at the symptoms, not the cause.
It's also true that Google is exploitative in how it uses its ad + News Power (Look at the content preloader discussion) so clearly it's not aiming at the innocent. It's just not the right tool for the job. Probably because so far no one has figured out how to fix this...
The law still applies and all that happened is that Google gets a free license and everyone who is not Google has to pay licensing fees.
I don't know the detail but the way you put it seems very fair to me. Law protect publishers against Google, so they can say to Google "no", except that their interest is to say "yes". So they say "yes". Looks to me that even if the end result is the same, the publishers had a say. Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking. Now, it has to ask. Looks fair to me.
This law won't hurt Google, they have the necessary lawyers and resources to deal with the ramifications. What this will hurt are the smaller search engines that don't have the same resources as Google. This law, if enacted, will end up giving more power to Google not less. For example, with the German law, Google was given a free license [2], but was DuckDuckGo given a license? As far as I can tell no. So all that changed is that Google has a license and its competitors don't. I can't see how this is a good thing for anybody but Google. It hurts consumers, reduces market choice and will end up hurting publishers.
[0] - http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html
[1] - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608
[2] - https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/22/german-publishers-...
Google News does not automatically take your content. You have to apply explicitely to get it included.
For regular search, there's always robots.txt. Claiming that there are any media/content producers who get included into the index against their will is absurd propaganda. Of course they want to be listed. They just want money, and Google has money, so they "convince" local politicians to make Google pay them their "share". Just like the Mafia.
No it does not, you need a lot of steps to make your website available on Google News, it does not work by default.