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I think FB was absolutely right to do it. Asking for payment for links embedded in hypertext goes against the ethos of www. It sets up a dangerous precedent for
by actuator 6y ago
I think FB was absolutely right to do it. Asking for payment for links embedded in hypertext goes against the ethos of www. It sets up a dangerous precedent for the web in general.
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.
- aplummer 6y agoI also agree with you, though I wonder about the copyright to the headline and blurb content when other people share. 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.
- actuator 6y ago> I wonder about the copyright to the headline and blurb content when other people share. 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?
- aplummer 6y agoI think you raise the kind of grey area legislation would be good to look at (fair use), not what we are looking at now. I guess from my brief thinking is once your bot visits the site to scrape it (and uses resources from the vendor) it’s a bit different to a screenshot.
- michaelmrose 6y agoThere is a trivial way to avoid being scraped by a search engine robots.txt 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.
- reaperducer 6y agoWhat if someone shares a screenshot of the article? 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.
- himinlomax 6y ago> though I wonder about the copyright to the headline and blurb content when other people share. Can you copyright 10 words? What about 5? 1?
- reaperducer 6y agoCan you copyright 10 words? What about 5? 1? What did your research turn up?
- himinlomax 6y agoThis interesting entry in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question
- reaperducer 6y agoI prefer this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(fallacy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur_(fallacy)
- madeofpalk 6y agoThe websites are explicitly giving that data to Facebook or others by annotating their HTML with the OG meta tags.
- reaperducer 6y agoThis is only a legitimate criticism if Facebook and the other didn't show a web page if it didn't have OG tags. 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.
- michaelmrose 6y agoCopyright is an exclusive right to reproduce a work in order to inspire the creation of works. It is not a moral right to control others communications. 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- polote 6y agoWhat is surprising is that outside of HN everyone blame Facebook. I mean, Facebook is giving free traffic to news websites in exchange of users' longer time spent on Facebook. How could Facebook to blamed by publishes ? By users maybe, but how come by publishers?
- pb7 6y agoTech illiteracy and strong political opinions are rampant. Dangerous combination for tech companies.
- IAmEveryone 6y agoCoal mines used to be in the business of giving employment to hungry children. Who did choose "freely" to work there, sometimes, when the alternative was starvation. 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.
- michaelmrose 6y agoIf Australia wanted to tax ad revenue earned in Australia and fund papers it would be non problematic. What is ridiculous is using Facebooks presence in Australia to tax an american sharing a link to another american based on the links destination.
- reaperducer 6y agoFacebook is giving free traffic to news websites 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.
- fabianhjr 6y agoCentralization goess against the ethos of www. It was supposed to desintermediate interactions yet we ended up with monopolies.
- pb7 6y agoIt's aggregation at most, not centralization. Hacker News and Reddit are also aggregators -- the content still exists elsewhere and can be accessed directly with ease.
- lostlogin 6y agoThey can be but they aren’t, users are staying on FB et al. How does this get fixed?
- michaelmrose 6y agoPeople not doing what you wish they would isn't a defect.
- parthdesai 6y agoYou don't require an account to view/access Hacker News and Reddit's content.
- pb7 6y agoIs that the issue? An account is required because the Facebook feed is largely dictated by who you're friends with. It's not based on a public popularity contest like Hacker News and Reddit. I'm not sure I follow.
- iamacyborg 6y agoIt's hard to make this argument when Google are centralising features like Google Shopping, flight comparisons, "knowledge box" etc.
- madeofpalk 6y agoThis might be a fair point, but it seems unrelated.