Comment by rtomanek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtomanek | Hacker News Reader

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To give an example of this: around 10 years ago I was co-running a website on a fairly narrow topic. One that most of the time is not relevant but every once in a while gets popular.

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.

> The big media and ad companies (Facebook, Google) are effectively making money off someone else's work.

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."

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