Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/26/totally-predictable.html
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On the one hand, short excerpts would certainly seem like the sort of thing covered by “fair use,” in the US and that seems reasonable and prudent. But if the news companies don’t want to be blackballed by Google, it seems like they can voluntarily agree to allow them to use short excerpts and link to them.
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And the beating goes on. It’s nice to see the US doesn’t have a monopoly on dumpster fires. Misery loves company, and all that.
Hopefully the will of the people becomes organized and directed at some point. Although, with a stranglehold on the actual news, it may become tougher to do.
I’m picturing automated guerrilla autonomous news scraper/linkers that can function like viruses. Or some kind of grassroots resistance. “Take Back the Internet”
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The problem is that most of the content is trash rewritten from an AP release, which can be solved with some curation from a real person.
I think most of the feed from Cory is like that, it give you an idea of what is going on, but ignores the small, and useless, updates that most news site transform into a new article.
The problem is that is hard to find someone who does the filtering for some topics.
I look forward to Yahoo News dropping AFP, the French government funded “news” service that has unlimited energy to try and interfere in U.S. politics
Google can still link to French press articles at no charge, they just can’t include text or pictures from the article.
The press publishers are in a bit of a quandary since all they can do is offer their stuff to search engines, with a price tag attached; they can’t force the search engines to actually accept that offer. If Google prefers not to take them up on their offer then that is a perfectly defensible business decision on the part of Google. If they make a counter-offer to include the press publishers’ material if the charge is waived, and a press publisher decides that appearing in Google News with text snippets is important enough to them, that in turn is a perfectly defensible business decision on the publisher’s part.
Ironically enough, politicians are calling once again for a “European search engine”, as an alternative to Google, which would presumably play by all the rules. This means that this new search engine would somehow have to find the money to pay press publishers for the right to include their text snippets, or else join Google in their sleazy and reprehensible strategy of simply “refusing to play”. Congratulations EU, you have just scored an own goal by either making it even more difficult for a credible competitor to Google to arise from Europe, or demonstrating that the special press publishers’ snippet tax doesn’t do what it was supposed to do.
Oh, and of course all of this was perfectly foreseeable from the beginning.
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And nothing of value was lost.
I don’t know how accurate this is, but there is talk that if the URL contains any text from the article (as little as two words, by some accounts), then the link tax/snippet tax/whatever it’s called applies.
If that’s in fact the case, the only thing that will happen is that Google will ignore such links completely. It’s not as if they don’t have other stuff that they can link to. Too bad for the press publishers in question.
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The Pirate Bay is going to have to branch out
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