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One flaw with the comparison is that event organizers submit their upcoming events to the newspaper and may even agree to an interview if the newspaper thought it worthy enough to write their own blurb. In some cases the event organizers will be paying to appear in the events list. Notice how the event organizers are making most of the decisions. The incentives are also completely different. Those events lists are promotional tools in the eyes of event organizers. They benefit from being in them.

With respect to news organizations and social media, they (or at least a subset of them) felt that social media companies were receiving a disproportionate benefit from their product. What resulted was a battle of the titans, where pretty much everyone loses out. It's important to remember that bit about titans. Both the news organizations and social media companies are taking their stance to benefit themselves, not consumers.

News organisations would routinely post links to their latest stories using their official social media accounts.

Don't you think they would have stopped if they felt they were being harmed by it?

That's why I made the comment about disproportionate benefit. It is clear that news organizations want, or at least feel compelled, to use social media as a promotional tool under some circumstances. Yet they don't like the terms that social media sites offer them.

In some respects, I don't blame them. If most people just skim the headlines and never click through to read the article, newspapers would be better served by their readership going to their own landing page. The other option is to recognize that the title and summary have intrinsic value, in which case the news organizations should have the right to request compensation.

I realize that there are other factors to consider here. For example: end users sharing links, either as information or to solicit discussion, should be considered a form of expression. Unfortunately, the business interests of social media sites muddies the waters.

It was an attempt to replicate similar legislation in Australia. The difference is Rupert Murdoch is almighty in Australian politics and any retorsion of the kind Meta deployed in Canada would have been met with stern reprisals from the supine government. No media group has that kind of power in Canada.

Meta gave notice at the start of 2024 that it wouldn't renew it's agreements in Australia when they expire.

It looks like the agreements have expired in the last few weeks and things are working their way through a process.

Good, the Canadian example gives them the ability to tell Murdoch to buzz off.

Very well put. The whole legislation is completely backwards to how the web has always worked.

I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. Or gain an audience through SEO and organic growth, including on social media. I'm happy when someone shares a link to it, because that means more eyeballs on what I'm putting out. Then I can choose if and how to monetize it. By suggesting that this harms the publisher makes no sense. Why would anyone ever pay for Google sponsored search results if it's harmful to their business?

The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content, which is an outright lie: reproducing content without permission is already covered by copyright law. Many of these news sites even have abstracts and social cards specifically for preview when shared.

The other analogy I like is "journalists drink coffee when writing. Starbucks has lots of money. Let's force Starbucks to give journalists free coffee, and a dollar out of their till whenever a journalist walks in."

It's backwards! Offensively so!

If these publishers didn't want their content on Facebook or Google, they can use paywalls, robots.txt, or referral blocks to stop it showing up. But none did - they just wanted to bite the hand that feeds for a few bucks, and we see how well that worked out for them.

Yes! The only argument I could ever get out of supporters of this law was "but they're billion-dollar corporations, they should pay their fair share!"

Well fine, then adjust the corporate tax rate however you like -- but don't be surprised when the corporations you just described as self-interested and greedy react in the obvious way to a brand new, explicitly created economic disincentive.

>"but they're billion-dollar corporations, they should pay their fair share!"

I don't think this is an invalid argument. This is arguable how YouTube works. One thing that is very interesting about Meta is that they have side-stepped the need to actually invest in content. There's nothing wrong with saying "my content drove eyeballs to your platform, so give me a cut of the ad revenue".

I think the bigger issue is, we have decided the marginal cost of journalism is nearly 0

YouTube pays because they're displaying copyrighted works. I don't think even the worst case— displaying opengraph tags that sites have to opt into, meets the bar for reproduction of a copyrighted work. I mean we're talking about linking here.

It's not that the marginal cost of journalism is a pittance, but that the marginal value to a social network of links to a few news sites is actually zero. I would take a bet that if social networks just up and banned all external links period it would be at worst revenue neutral.

>YouTube pays because they're displaying copyrighted works.

I think this is a distinction without a difference. YouTube paid for content long before they got serious about IP. Similarly, TikTok had to adopt the same mindset with the Creator fund.

More seriously, the reason why Google pays for content is not because they are billion dollar content, it's because the marginal cost for video is greater than 0, and if they didn't pay for it, the content simply wouldn't exist. However, news article pretty much spawn out of thin air. It exists despite the tech giants not paying for it.

Pro photos cost a lot of money to use and FB just gets them for free. Why?

Also, big news corps have lots of correspondents and offices around the globe, which are expensive too.

> Pro photos cost a lot of money to use and FB just gets them for free. Why?

a) Because the photographer uploaded it, granting a license to display it under the TOS

b) Because someone else uploaded it without permission and Facebook is protected by DMCA safe harbor provisions so long as they remove it upon request

> Also, big news corps have lots of correspondents and offices around the globe, which are expensive too.

Lots of things are expensive without creating some obligation for an unrelated third party to pay you for it.

FB should still not get all these things for free.

So Facebook should be obliged to pay you every time you upload a photo? Anyone with a camera will be a millionaire by tomorrow morning.

And the government did choose to require Facebook to pay for the news. Facebook decided the price wasn't worth it, so now they no longer allow news on their platform. They aren't getting anything for free. Fair and square.

Responding to 'it seems fair to ask for treatment that other media authors get' with 'lets forget all nuance and adopt the most extreme position one could take' by comparing people who sell their work for a living with people who post pictures of themselves for attention is not helpful and does not make your point stronger.

Facebook doesn't get these things for free. Facebook is no more able to commit copyright infringement than you are.

There's no difference between amateur and professional photographers under the law. In both cases it's a photo uploaded to Facebook by someone who owns the copyright on it. When you upload a photo to Facebook you grant them a license to display it when people see your post. They're not Getty, you're not selling your photo to them.

Like I'm not sure where the disconnect it, do you wish Facebook had a monetization scheme like YouTube? Because that's entirely voluntary. For "pirated" content monetization is a voluntary offering that serves as an alternative to issuing a takedown request.

I don't wish anything. I am telling you that resorting to comparisons which destroy the nuance of life and human actions is detrimental to conversations and that you should stop doing that because it doesn't make you right, it makes you an agitator.

Where are they wrong?

They didn't make any factual statements in the comment I initially replied to.

Yeah, he's just twisting the facts to make a point.

Still no comment on why news corps have to pay for pics and content when FB gets it all for free.

> I run a website. I can pay Google, MS, Meta, etc money to make my site show up higher in search results. ... The lobbyists and politicians have framed it as "using" or "stealing" the content

Cough, reddit.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/08/01/1129247/reddit-ceo-...

Same mistake? Note that "AI training" has now made an appearance. Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place.

> Ignore that Reddit has no ownership of the user-written content in the first place.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reddit might not retain sole ownership, but they certainly seem to own a copy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement

  Except and solely to the extent such a restriction is impermissible under applicable law, you may not, without our written agreement:

  license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content;

  [...]

  By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms.

  When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world.

"Own a copy" doesn't mean anything here. They have a non-exclusive sublicensable license to use Your Content. They have no ownership at all of Your Content, and have no standing to do anything if someone commercially exploits it (except for content posted by Reddit itself). The individual comments/posts are copyrighted by the individual posters. To the extent that Reddit does not give you a sublicense to exploit the content, the individual posters would be the ones who could make a claim for copyright infringement.

If you don't have an account, then you haven't agreed to the ToS. Indeed, you can visit e.g. https://old.reddit.com/new/.json to fetch the latest posts without ever even seeing a link to any terms of service, much less agreeing to any. If someone distributes that scraped data via torrent (they do), then (again, except for posts by Reddit staff) Reddit has nothing to say. They have no claim to that data.

Agreed, except that those people who haven't agreed to the ToS also have no legitimate right to the work outside of a separate agreement with the publisher.

Just putting it on Reddit doesn't make it fair game for everyone.

Similarly, posting a news article to Facebook grants FB the same rights, more or less, but it doesn't grant Joe Random the right to re-publish the same article unless he makes an outside deal with the original author.

Now imagine that the newspaper not only has a page on community events but starts selling tickets for those events. Some well-meaning politician comes in and says that the newspaper should pay a portion of the ticket sale to the organisers. So the newspaper stops advertising the event in their pages, and the event starts struggling with less attendance than before.

Analogies are nice, but one should always be cautious that they don't oversimplify the issue.

> progressive politicians

I would characterize the current gov't as staunchly neolib.

The Trudeau gov't has listened with great attention to all corpo lobbyists from oil & gas to big media groups, so I don't think "hostile to economic principles" particularly applies eotber.

What you don’t consider is that FB is heavily profiting from professionally created content that takes a lot of money to create, with many users just skimming the headlines without ever clicking through.

In short, just another billionaire profiting off of other people’s work without ever paying for it.

Those new AI companies, which are also conducting large-scale theft, are no different and should either seize operation or also start paying their fair share.

Well then this is great no? The billionaires and Facebook don't get to profit from the media. Since the law was passed on the premise that Facebook was basically stealing money from local media corporations, surely our national media industry is doing better now by not getting exploited like that.

Yet I keep seeing sob stories after sob stories from the exact same media organizations that were vehemently pushing for this. Something about leopards and faces getting eaten comes to mind

(Also, media corporations here are -in typical Canadian fashion- a handful of giants controlling basically most outlets. A part from the state sponsored/funded CBC. So there's basically no little guys in this fight, and Canadian corporations always try to pull this type of stuff to protect their little corporatist fiefdoms through the federal government)

But why should FB get this content for free (including the images used)?

Because the news organizations are giving it to FB, with the intent of FB using it in a way that gets users to click on the link, and all of this is disproportionately to the benefit of the news organizations.

Also, how do you know this is "disproportionately to the benefit of the news organizations"? FB also quite heavily profits from the massive engagement this kind of content generates. Content that is often very expensive to produce.

There is a very obvious value we can assign to the outbound traffic from FB to the news sites (based on their typical advertising CPM), so we know the news sites are profiting.

We can also infer that the effect is significant based on how much the news organizations are complaining about losing this free source of traffic.

On the other hand, FB is willing to block news links, which suggests they don't actually profit from them meaningfully. Nor does blocking them, or winding down the dedicated FB News product, appear to be causing any hit on their user or revenue numbers.

Now, you turn. How do you know that "FB heavily profits" from this?

FB should give back more than just clicks. See YouTube.

That's fine. Now it doesn't use their content. So there's nothing for them to give. Yet we have seen articles after articles of media corporations complaining about how this is still unfair to them.

Clearly then Facebook did provide more value for them than it took, otherwise why wouldn't they just be happy by the current situation now that their links are protected from the big man?

Also YouTube isn't just a link aggregator. News media usually have their own platforms with their own ads and monetization. And they still have them! So they are completely free to monetize their assets/content. Canadian media isn't entitled to getting services from Facebook and also demanding payment while doing so.

They don't any more! This whole article is about how they go out of their way to prevent users from even posting links to it!

Yes, it would not make sense for the GP to consider that statement, since it was just made up for political purposes.

There is no evidence of it being true, and some circumstantial evidence of it not being true: namely, that FB was willing to block news from their site, and there was no obvious impact to e.g. their financials.

I’m not following. What’s been made up for political purposes?

That "FB is heavily profiting from professionally created content that takes a lot of money to create". Sorry, I thought this was obvious from context, since it is what you accused the GP of not considering.

But they are profiting quite heavily from it. Look at all the engagement it drives, especially political content.

Yes, you keep asserting that with no evidence. Just saying it more often doesn't make it any more true.

Where's your evidence?

First, you're the one making an affirmative statement about what FB should be doing. The burden of proof is on you.

Second, I've posted the (admittedly circumstantial) evidence in direct reply to you multiple times. You've not engaged with it in any way, but just repeated your talking point.

You don't appear to be acting in good faith in this discussion. Your need to put some effort into this, and actually reply to what people write.

The burden of proof should be on FB, they're the ones hiding the data on this.

>> FB is willing to block news links, which suggests they don't actually profit from them meaningfully.

This is just an assumption and not evidence.

FB just isn't willing to pay for it.

So just to be clear, you do indeed not have any kind of evidence at all for the claim about FB profiting from news links?

> In short, just another billionaire profiting off of other people’s work without ever paying for it.

Why are the news orgs unhappy after Facebook stopped doing it?

How do you know they’re unhappy?

Because they're constantly posting articles whining that "Meta's news ban" is killing the media.

Yeah, but Meta wasn’t willing to pay for it.

Why should power-hungry Zuck get everything for free when YouTube, for example, is giving everyone a cut?

Well, maybe he shouldn’t but it seems he’d rather not deal with this problem at all and now we have the status quo. That has to be a situation you’re willing to accept, unless you’re saying Facebook should be forced to allow news, and be forced to pay for it.

> Yeah, but Meta wasn’t willing to pay for it.

Sorry, I don't see how this contradicts the idea that the media don't like the current situation.

This is not really a dry cut. There are people that pay to be on a talkshow or in a newspaper or to perform in an event. Then there are people who get paid to do the same. It all has to do with the economics of the situation.

In this case, those big newspapers were betting that they drive a large portion of Facebook engagement in Canada, so they wanted a cut. Facebook didn't think so. It's trying to find the answer to the question "How many people use Facebook because that's where they get their news?" vs "How many people get the news because they happen to be on Facebook?"

I think it’s more apparent that this shows “for how many people Facebook is the internet to them”.