10 ms·

I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary

• cush 3y ago
  Nobody would be complaining if google was just linking…
• notatoad 3y ago
  >I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossible to read an article around the ads, login prompts, and chumboxes. News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. Giving them more money to do the thing they've spent so long failing at isn't going to solve this problem. >directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves yes. and specifically, make sure the fund is actually funding journalism. a link tax that gets paid out to news sites only incentivizes them to do the bare minimum amount of journalism to still qualify as a news site, and then fill up the rest of the site with SEO clickbait to maximize their clicks for the link tax.
  • akira2501 3y ago
    > News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me. Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process? The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place. Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
    • izacus 3y ago
      > To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage. Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either. Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.
      • akira2501 3y ago
        Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply. I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome. I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?
• shepherdjerred 3y ago
  Maybe this isn't quite the same thing, but I had been threatened with legal action in the past for linking to a site's public assets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26550846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26550846
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • sethammons 3y ago
    How did that story play out?
    • shepherdjerred 3y ago
      Ultimately I removed the deep links that allowed you to use third-party clients to stream the videos (e.g. VLC), so now you just have to use their very poor UI. My site does still support searching, though, which they still haven't added after... four years.
• babypuncher 3y ago
  If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in places like Facebook where they actively don't want you to actually follow the link. Facebook wants you to leave a like or a comment right there under the preview, then keep scrolling.
  • bawolff 3y ago
    To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize information happening elsewhere. Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.
    • ninkendo 3y ago
      At some point someone is actually doing journalism though (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements which pay money for the information. You could reasonably argue that google should be doing the same, right?
      • izacus 3y ago
        Whoever is doing journalism, it's not those sites that now want a governmental tax handout to continue being bad.
        • HDThoreaun 3y ago
          It often is though. Many of these sites are employing the journalists who are uncovering the original story.
      • dmazzoni 3y ago
        I think the reality is that journalism was a ridiculously inefficient business. A big national event happens. News organizations collectively send 30 different reporters to the scene. Those 30 reporters each write up a firsthand story. Now hundreds of smaller news organizations (local papers, local TV news stations, etc.) rewrite it in their own words and put it in their version. In the end, for any major story you end up with hundreds of articles being written, but out of those there are only a handful of genuinely different narratives, each retold in slightly different words hundreds of times. It's rare that a local news organization adds any significant value. In my opinion, NPR is the only organization that gets it right: there's a single national organization that does the news at the top of every hour, and local stations then come on to give local news following that. A single national organization does morning and evening long-form news shows with the national shows, and each local station does its own long-form shows with local news. Very little redundancy.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• psychlops 3y ago
  > and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves Having any government fund news journalism is a bad idea. In any event, you can be certain the revenue will be redistributed to fund the war machine in another country.
  • wrsh07 3y ago
    The BBC...?
    • roenxi 3y ago
      The standout institution of British propaganda and intelligence gathering? I can see why the British might be very happy with them and they're often intelligent and classy about the whole thing. But they aren't a counterexample of public money being used to grease wheels in the war machine.
  • Cesura 3y ago
    Surely you're speaking about your own country of residence here? In Estonia for example (which tangentially has one of the highest press freedom rankings in the world), ERR ("Estonian Public Broadcasting") is widely considered to be one of the most trustworthy news platforms in the country. The reason for this is simple: there is no incentive to pump out journalistic sludge for clicks, or to prey on the public's collective anxieties for larger quarterly profits. I suppose you could argue that it indirectly supports the "war machine" in Ukraine, but I don't really consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense, especially given the national security implications at home.
    • psychlops 3y ago
      You are Estonian? Few would consider it unethical to fund wars of self-defense. But self-defense is not a clear term, see for example the Bush Doctrine and preemptive war. America has a historical habit of funding its future enemies, and in more current wars of simply maintaining the status quo.
• alephknoll 3y ago
  > I have sympathy for news publishers Why? They are the most spoiled, privileged and entitled group out there. Not only did they force google, facebook, etc to give them preferential treatment in search/algorithm/etc, now they want google, facebook, etc to pay them for the 'privilege' of giving them preferential treatment. Not only do they want google/facebook to send users to their sites, they want google/facebook to pay them for that privilege. The shameless hubris. > therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves. No. That's for authoritarian countries like britain and china. > huge risks of unintended consequence But government funded news has no risks? What we need is to break up google/facebook/etc. We need competition in the search, smartphone, social media, etc space. The fundamental problem is that two companies control so much of american mindshare.
• freejazz 3y ago
  Copyright is the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, this law has nothing to do with copyright law.
  • lupire 3y ago
    That's an extremely narrow view. Federal copyright law is Federal jurisdiction. States have the power to make their own non-conflicting copyright laws.
    • freejazz 3y ago
      No they don't. Show me copyright law from ONE US state!
• visarga 3y ago
  I see a parallel between the news linking case and AI training on copyrighted content (without regurgitating it back later). If AI can't use ideas from copyrighted works, then nobody can. Because anyone could be secretly using AI we have to apply the same strict standards of attribution to all human works. And that would lead to a chilling effect, any creative act takes the risk of incidental infringement. Should copyright owners control the external discourse about their work, or own the ideas in their works? Should we upgrade AI from protected expression to protected ideas?
  • cout 3y ago
    > If AI can't use ideas from copyrighted works, then nobody can. Because anyone could be secretly using AI we have to apply the same strict standards of attribution to all human works. Yes, we should be applying strict standards of attribution to all works, human or otherwise. IMO one of the biggest defects of language models currently is lack of attribution; if sources are not properly cited, there is no way to verify the veracity of what is written. Unfortunately, apart from the technical difficulty of implementing attribution, the exact combination of sources is part of a model's "secret sauce", so there is an economic incentive to not cite.
• idle_zealot 3y ago
  > the problem they are trying to solve is actually a "social good" outcome, and therefore directly tax the platforms and then redistribute the revenue to a fund created by government for news journalism themselves This generalizes to copyright and patent IP in general; we want to encourage the creation of valuable art, inventions, and other cultural artifacts, but instead of rewarding their production in a more direct manner we instead imposed a huge restriction on the behavior of all people when interacting with media or technology in order to carve out a reward for the creator. And now this law once again restricts the freedom of others to use or share information in order to carve out a reward by way of exception to those restrictions. Creating rewards by removing freedoms from the majority of people is extremely backwards.