In the US, factual information can not be copyrighted.
I believe it can in the EU, although I might be misrepresenting their official stance. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that the EU allows you to copyright databases. I'm sure EU residents can correct me if I'm missing some kind of subtlety.
At least in the US though, there is nothing remotely illegal about looking up a fact on a website and then giving it to someone else directly, even if that diverts traffic away from the original site. Copyright was never intended to cover stuff like that.
I can't really find any good summary, but this sparse wikipedia article will give you an idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote
I agree.
The vast majority of the world disagrees with copyright. They participate in violations on an everyday basis. Many of them possibly hundreds of times per day.
Essentially, we have a distributed proof that your "copyright" is damage to be routed around. Nonsense. Piffle.
Lawmakers will not win this fight except by enslaving their population. People _do not want_ this. Empirically, provably, visibly.
We happened to have some recent news stories related to the topic plus a very relevant, recent photo.
This was reused (without asking) by a major news outlet. The photo especially bumped their views numbers.
When we enquired about their use of our content, they said they were quoting and, after further prodding, that they could pay us a nominal fee.
Notice a problem with that?
We had to: 1. Be aware that our content is being used, 2. Be the side that is active in seeking renumeration, 3. Try to fight a major news organisation if we wanted a real cut of their ad revenue.
How do you do this if you are small?
Changing the balance and the burden is definitely a move to the right direction, in this case.
The big media and ad companies (Facebook, Google) are effectively making money off someone else's work. I could understand it when they were new and their market was still developing, today however they've grown too strong, I feel.
This seems like a cultural difference between copyright proponents and critics (both in the US and EU). To me, this criticism is meaningless. I think that the whole point of modern society is to allow people to make money off of other people's work.
I think there some people who look at a business being built off of other's work, and they say, "By default, we should be suspicious of this with a few exceptions. Unless the public good is enormous (arguably search engines still qualify there), if I make something, only I should profit from it."
Other people look at those businesses and say, "By default, this is the system working completely as intended. Unless the public harm is enormous, if you make something, other people should be able to make things with it."
It's worth noting that in the example you bring up, the news outlet wasn't doing anything with linking or user generated content. Their editorial board just stole your photo. You'd be in the exact same position after this law, because they weren't doing anything that would pass your photo through an upload filter, and they (probably) weren't directly linking to the photo on your site.
Given that the example you list is very clearly something that is not fair use, it seems to me like an even bigger jump than normal to move from "sometimes people steal stuff" to "Google in specific is stealing stuff."
And how does one find new sites in the first place.
People will now go for news to Google. Google doesn't hire a single journalist and will happily cash in all the ad money. It is not sustainable.