If they really had to find a nice middleground with FB profiting from news consumption from within; they could have not put `og` tags on the page or asked FB to block metadata extraction. But asking for payment for links in search results or shared posts is just bad regulation.
Nobody is denying that it was in publishers' own interest to be linked to on Facebook. Indeed, the law only makes sense that way. Where economics or physics makes something impossible, no law is needed to stop it.
At issue is the power imbalance between Facebook and publishers. the latter is a group of many, who cannot coordinate because of prisoner's dilemma mechanics and maybe even antitrust reasons. The law is supposed to rectify this perceived power imbalance by external enforcement.
What is ridiculous is using Facebooks presence in Australia to tax an american sharing a link to another american based on the links destination.
That's not how the publishers see it.
The publishers see it as people just read the headlines and summary on Facebook, then never ever go to the actual web site to read the story.
It's similar to the way web site owners are unhappy with the way Google scrapes microdata from web sites and presents the information as its own content in those search side panels. It removes an incentive for people to visit the web site that actually created the content.
Facebook and the rest of the doomscrolling industry have trained people to think that "Reading the news" is just scrolling scrolling scrolling, rather than actually going to a publisher's web site to see what's on offer.
People turn to specific sources because those sources provide coverage over hot issues, but what people are interested in are the hot issues, not Axios or Buzzfeed. Google and Apple's content aggregation is giving customers what they want.
Says who?
People have been picking their brands for hundreds of years. Some people would watch CBS News. Some would watch NBC News. Some would read the Houston Chronicle. Some would read the Houston Post.
Then when they wanted to drill down into something more specific, they'd look at Gardener's World, Birdwatching, Sky & Telescope, etc...
The all-you-can-eat buffet of information is a recent invention promoted as the be-all and end-all of "choice" by the people who make money off of low-quality information gluttony.
Drinking from a firehose is not the best way to slake a thirst.
I'm not sure people appreciate the balkanization of TV content either. The problem isn't that HBO does or doesn't make great hits, the problem is that the hot original content can randomly pop up in another content kingdom, and HBO doesn't have a stranglehold on relevance or hotness. The same is true with all these news outlets wanting individual subscriptions and "brand loyalty".
I think what people want is one Apple TV to rule them all.
Note, I’m not saying this is a good thing, just using myself as an example. And I am guilty of just skimming headlines most days.
But this is the problem publishers face. Facebook and Google, et al, provide news from publishers in a format that is good enough for most people. I don’t think they’re wrong for doing this. In fact, I think the onus is on publishers to be compelling enough to draw people in further. They may have one or two good writers, but they’re hidden in a pile of manure and ads.
This is going to be a hot take but maybe it's because people have been conditioned to think that the articles themselves are often low quality clickbait offering little beyond the headline and stuffed with more ads than content. Quality of journalism and consumer trust in media has been declining for years.
But the web sites didn't get to be the way they are because people were visiting them. They got to be the way they are because people stopped visiting them.
Anecdotal, but what I see a lot of time is that people don't even read the news being posted - only the title, the preview and the text it was shared with and then jump into commenting. (Pretty much like what I'm doing here now :) ). Actually, I may have even seen a piece of research on this.
So at the end it doesn't seem like it's such a great business for the publishers.
FB is not entirely to blame for the position publishers find themselves in, but saying FB gives them free traffic is too generous of a take IMO. FB and others have worked hard to shape the internet as we have it today, where most traffic is centralized in a few “portals” to the rest of the web. Publishers need FB traffic because there’s few other ways to get it, and that dependency on FB is not unintentional.
A very good contention. Goes to bolster opposition to any link tax.
Note that having to negotiate extra surcharge with news publishers would make online even harder for smaller, independent websites, and (relatively) easier for large platforms. A link tax incentivizes centralization.
And the current excuse of "only large platform" is just that - an excuse, easily changed with a stroke of a legislative pen, once the precedent of link tax is established.
So regardless of the egalitarian ethos of the Web, the natural result of leaving the environment to invent itself is that there will be one search engine that basically everybody uses, one social network that basically everybody uses (and that one network might change from generation to generation).
IMO I agree any website should be able to opt out (or in) of Facebook if they like (i seriously doubt they would), and then everyone can run their own website.
I think this is a slippery slope on copyright enforcement, we have seen it getting ridiculous on YouTube. What if someone shares a screenshot of the article? and if we do this, are we not allowed to write dialogue exchange from movies in social media posts as well?
For facebook most of the time when it creates a screenshot to show next to the title in a share results in 1 or possibly many views driving revenue for the linked site for a small increase in bandwidth.
For example their site gets pulled once and read a dozen times.
Probably no different than someone photocopying a newspaper article in a library.
One of the colleges I went to had pretty strict rules about that posted right above the copy machine.
Can you copyright 10 words? What about 5? 1?
What did your research turn up?
The publishers adding OG tags is a coping mechanism, not an invitation.
And there are a lot of other ways that OG metadata gets used besides social media.
The reasons it is nonsense to own exclusive right to a title
-It hamstrings communication about the work including both criticism and the ordinary business of civilization where we communicate things that we have learned with one another. The title is the only proper referent.
-It never stands in for the work itself unless the work is itself so trivial as to be not worth protection. For example [insert name] died that is all.
There is no reason to suppose one ought to be able to opt in or out of being shared on Facebook than one could opt in or out of being shared in an email or in a coffee shop.
Can you imagine going into starbucks and seeing a list of authors whose works were licensed to be discussed there.
A lot of people confuse there being a handle somewhere with the right to grasp it. Facebook being at a central point in many people's communication could pay the parties being discussed, so could your email provider, or your cellphone carrier.
Any of the above could allow parties to censor your communications at the behest of others like you suggested.
The fact that copyright is so adaptable as to readily be twisted into such ridiculous ideas is a good argument for throwing the whole thing in the trash.