No idea why this is getting downvoted, but would love to hear what people think is wrong.
Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much money out of it.
My point is simply that this is more than just linking. It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a terrible choice -- cut off the source of traffic or give it away for free. That's different than a dev deciding to open source a project.
The business model of links + ads is going to be more in peril in the future than it is today, regardless of the regulatory environment. We see the problem all over media: If you are relying on google to give you traffic, your content better be really cheap and SEO'd to death, or be a funnel where most content is hidden, trying to drive people into subscriptions. Agglomeration in the traffic driving and ad spaces leads to them taking most of the profit unless there's agglomeration on the other end. Just like in American healthcare, more people using the same insurance companies that try to drag reimbursement rates down is met by hospital networks gobbling up practices and pharmacies, as to get market power that the insurer cannot ignore. So we'll see situations where, say, Google and the NYT have to decide whether the search traffic is worth it, and what's the right price for letting the latest AI ingest the entire contents of the Times.
It's not about moral good or bad, but about how incentive structures leave us with few viable economic models. Both software engineers and journalists will change behavior to make more money.
Search engines and social networks don't owe sites they link or their users link to any traffic. It would be silly to be like, "it's only copyright infringement if users don't click through the link enough."
I do think there should be some laws around funding certain open source software that has become critical to the functioning of society -- whether or not that's paid by tax payers in general, or by the companies using that software is a different question though.
Government funded open source strikes me as something that can very much make sense, in certain cases. Some software very much operates at utility scale, and yet, doesn't have a funding model beyond the good will of volunteers. This is dangerous, and also the type of situation that the government exists to solve.
So, yes, companies probably should pay for at least some open source software, maybe indirectly through tax, maybe through some other mechanism.
I think that would be an amazing law, actually.
A quasi-tax that affects everyone and helps fund public goods is easy to get my support.
But taxing specifically linking by a couple companies is not good.
A headline has always been an attempt to sell an article access to headlines and has a long history of freely accessible for this reason. Publishers WANT links to their article to use their headlines because that is how the articles are sold.
You talk about the 'atomic unit of journalism' being reporting... but that isn't really a meaningful assertion. What is meaningful is that facts are not copyrightable (which is good.) If you are selling access to facts as your product, you have to differentiate yourself on either storytelling, curation or speed.
Notably, the California law covers all links, not just those that include a summary or headline.
I don't think the crisis has anything to do with aggregation. I think the crisis has to do with how money is spent on advertising, how much of that money Google is able to extract via their monopoly, and the degree to which we've allowed capital markets to gut such a vital institution. I think the EFF report linked in the article does a much better job of breaking down the issue, even if I don't agree with every recommendation it makes or think they are sufficient.
My point is that sharing links is a double edged sword that was sort of forced on the news publishers. They've grown dependent on the traffic -- and agreed, they need a different business model -- but thats tough when anyone else can undercut you and publish for free, and then compete for that same traffic.
Also, if you think you can differentiate on curation or speed, you cannot, because those same links will appear regardless.
And yes, the advertising monopoly is a huge part of this -- but the argument has always been that the search engines need news just as much as news needs search engines. But they've set up the situation in a way that they have all the leverage.
What are you talking about? "sharing links" was not forced on publishers by anyone, not even sort of. Sharable links to content are not in any way damaging, so can't be a double edged sword. Sharable links are purely beneficial and you have done zero of the work to show otherwise.