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Comment by forestingfisher | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean HN will have to pay for all the links too? Tired of this overregulation

Do you think Meta is asked to pay for the titles?

They are in Australia, and it’s probably safe to assume this law would be pretty similar to ours. In our version, Part 52B explicitly renders these three things as being exactly the same for the purposes of the law:

(a) the content is reproduced on the service or is otherwise placed on the service; or

(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or

(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.

Which quite literally means that they consider a post that only contains hyperlink (b) or a link and only a title (even just the title would fall under (c)) to be as bad as a social media site ripping off the whole article!

This was the same conflation used by the supporters of the law and pretty much every news article about it before it was passed, basically all of which dishonestly claimed that social media sites were doing (a) when they were mostly only posting a title and sentence or two synopsis (that is supplied by the news site itself in its meta tags!!)

Fair enough. Wonder what Italians want to do. I searched briefly and all I could find was "content", which I assumed were actual extracts.

> Tired of this overregulation

Why ? When the alternative is to let companies to whatever makes the number go up at the expense of everyone else, regulation is the only thing to protect normal people.

You are not protecting "normal people". These types of laws are nothing but attempts at rent seeking by dying legacy media companies that were too incompetent to figure out working digital strategies on their own. And they would already be dead without the traffic that big platforms like Meta and Google are sending their way.

If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.

While you might not like the legacy media, the fact is they're still doing some work. That work needs to be reimbursed?

If Meta and co create their own content, they're free to do with it what the like. I need to pay google maps for a certain amount of useage etc. Why should Meta and co get an exception on content ?

Why don't you just subscribe to these newspapers and give them a read instead of demanding other tax payers subsidize their business?

Who said anything about tax payers until you said it just now?

Oh enough already. 99% of 'new media' is complete ass - clickbait, sensationalist drivel, opinion masquerading as fact, or all 3. Blogging and the rise of 'citizen journalists' has led to very little journalism but vast amounts of information pollution.

>If you send traffic to some e-commerce platform through an affiliate link, you are the one who gets paid. These companies are instead trying to rig the system in such a way that the affiliate would be forced to pay them. It's an absurd and desperate proposal that deserves to be rejected.

This isn't what is happening. People read the summarized headline/article on meta's turf and then don't go to the source article. If meta were just posting the link, it would be fine, but that isn't what is happening here.

Should HN links be compensated on a percentage of non-click-throughs? There are people who just come for the comments. Would you support this law being universal and not only applied to Meta/news?

HN links are not article summaries, so your question is not apt.

Meta doesn't have to pay for the links. It's the summaries. I suspect the publishers would welcome the links, as they'd drive traffic and ad revenue. Instead, Meta is siphoning the revenue by summarizing the content.

While they cite the summaries as copyright infringement, news organizations have previously rejected removing them as a way to resolve things. They ultimately want money.

Meta's fix has been to try to walk away from the news. They removed the news tab in some regions.

I think Meta walking away from news is doing the second best thing they could here, albeit cowardly.

The best thing, imo would be that Meta has enough dev talent that they could just post the link and not the summary. It isn't for the publishers to decide what information a Meta user's post contains.

In other words (IMO): rev share for summaries seems reasonable; a tax on links does not. It's like the way music handles sampling: there were many lawsuits that resulted in there being a clearing requirement for the cost of using a sample of a song in your music, e.g., Biz Markie vs. Gilbert O'Sullivan (1991).

Why not? We the posters are providing free content and views and exposure for a VC fund worth billions of dollars.

Why are we not getting kickbacks?

Because you're doing it voluntarily.

Agree. But, sadly, we live in a world in which so often what is obvious needs to be stated.

Did I hallucinate several years of discourse about volunteer work on the internet should be paid? And that lefty types were yelling about how billionaire corps should compensate volunteer work because they clearly had money?

Something starting from Reddit mods?

Those conversations have definitely happened and while I have no clue what the lefty types settled on, in my opinion such internet volunteers should lose money.

I don't know if you read it but I've never heard such a thing and i do read the lefty sites sometimes.

Sometimes but I've never seen commenting counted as work.

Sounds ridiculous, but yes. They earn "something" via their exclusive advertisement spots here.

I guess the daily active users are something else though.

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