I'm a lot less worried about the "link tax" clauses than the copyright liability clause. Not because the link tax is a good idea but because it's a spectacular own goal that is mainly going to hurt the idiots who lobbied for it.
Giving companies direct liability for policing copyright in user-uploaded content is a much bigger disaster, on two separate fronts, both highly damaging:
1) Implementing youtube-style content id will be a huge burden for small companies. Youtube reportedly spent tens of millions on it over several years. This tilts the field in favor of large incumbents even more than it already is by nature. While the amount of content to screen is really small, human-driven filtering is a possibility, but as soon as you need to scale up you're screwed. Any startup in Europe that needs to do this is a no-go from now on, IMO.
2) Back to that multi-milion content ID system: it sucks. It sucks really badly. It over-reports infringement left right and center. Now imagine what it will be like when youtube is liable a priori for every false negative; any sane legal department is going to demand a minimal number of false negatives at any cost. Now imagine what that will do to the false positive rate. Now imagine what the false positive rate will be when every site has to bodge together a similar system, with neither google's money nor google's technical expertise.
The second point has been missed by most criticism of the Copyright Directive, and to me it's the biggest problem of all. I fear the wasteland that will result. Are we going back to the point where only a handful of content producers exist and everybody else should be content just consuming it? Welcome to the 20th century, Europe.
> 1) Implementing youtube-style content id will be a huge burden for small companies.
I will be extremely surprised if that will be required from small companies, considering the directive expressly says that "special account shall be
taken of [...] ensuring that the burden on SMEs
remains appropriate and that automated
blocking of content is avoided."
(SME = Small and medium-sized enterprises)
There is also no language saying that pre-screening is required, only that "online
content sharing service providers and
right holders shall cooperate in good faith
in order to ensure that unauthorised
protected works or other subject matter
are not available on their services", which could, IMO, be satisfied by a DMCA-style complaints process.
> The second point has been missed by most criticism of the Copyright Directive, and to me it's the biggest problem of all.
IMO trying to fix the false positive issue is the best part of the directive, as it requires access to human review, reasonably justified decisions, and it requires users to have access to an independent body for the resolution of disputes. This would be a big improvement over the current Youtube system.
You're citing the European Parliament language; the current ongoing trilogue negotiation is between this and the original council text. The SME exemption is seen as a controversial addition by some of the Council negotiators, and may go away or be watered down.
A couple of things to note -- this "compromise" text moves Article 13 into being a blanket liability, which means that intermediaries can be sued unless they get prior authorisation from all rightsholders. Given that anyone is a rightsholder for their own material, that seems... unlikely. The only conceivable alternative under the rest of the proposal is some sort of copyright filter — but even then, it has to be effectively perfect, so that's potentially not enough.
The other point is to note that under this language, being an SME is one of seven factors that may or may not make you liable; thus injecting even more uncertainty into whether you will be liable for the actions of your users.
(Disclosure: I work at EFF, and have been tracking this for some time.)
> IMO trying to fix the false positive issue is the best part of the directive, as it requires access to human review, reasonably justified decisions, and it requires users to have access to an independent body for the resolution of disputes. This would be a big improvement over the current Youtube system.
Will it? That sounds expensive at scale. I can see how some hosting services might decide that the thing to do is clamp down on who gets to publish things to help keep reviewing and appeals costs under control.
I mean, vetted creators of content are where all the money is to be made anyway, so why bother with the extra costs and pseudo-judicial process that comes with letting random people share media? Seems kinda unprofitable.
"The category of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is made up of enterprises which employ fewer than 250 persons and which have an annual turnover not exceeding 50 million euro, and/or an annual balance sheet total not exceeding 43 million euro."
The other method is to rearrange the business model to introduce shell SMEs or affiliates that pay licenses for subdomains (or what have you) to corporate and have very small actual roles aside from being the unregulated party.
The EU added restrictions related to the data itself to prevent outsourcing the liability in the case of GDPR, it will be interesting to see how well they can define and prevent structuring in this case.
I'm sure you'll be able to fill out a form and get an email a day later, "We're sorry, we've reviewed your case but have decided against you (because we have no reason to ever take any risk)"
The DMCA is a shining example of just how well these appeals processes work...
I don't think that would satisfy the requirements of the directive:
> Any complaint
filed under such mechanisms shall be
processed without undue delay and be
subject to human review. Right holders
shall reasonably justify their decisions to
avoid arbitrary dismissal of complaints.
It also requires Member States to ensure "that users have
access to an independent body for the
resolution of disputes as well as to a court
or another relevant judicial authority to
assert the use of an exception or
limitation to copyright rules".
So damned if you do and damned if you don’t? How does this right here not destroy the prospect of any small company trying to scale operations in this space?
From the company’s perspective, it’s like a DDoS attack that is illegal to defend yourself against.
Small companies have lower requirements for what they need to do under the directive.
About the measures taken, for example:
> The measures
should be proportionate in order to avoid imposing disproportionately complicated or costly
obligations on certain online content sharing service providers, taking into account notably
their small size.
For small/micro enterprises this then means that for the DDoS attack you'd need the rightsholders to invalidly notify of large amounts of content that needs removing (each one specifically) which must be done with the intent of killing off the platform. Would that be legal? To submit false claims deliberately to hurt the company?
> The measures taken by the online content sharing service providers should be without
prejudice to the application of exceptions and limitations to copyright, including in particular
those which guarantee the freedom of expression of users. For that purpose the service
providers should put in place mechanisms allowing users to complain about the blocking or
removal of uploaded content that could benefit from an exception or limitation to copyright.
Replies to the users’ complaints should be provided in a timely manner. To make these
mechanisms function, cooperation from rightholders is needed, in particular with regard to the
assessment of the complaints submitted and justifications for the removal of users’ content.
Emphasis mine.
The section also says member states are free to put in place independent authorities to assess these, although I'm sure somewhere else it in this is a requirement rather than simply a suggestion. I'll update if I can find it.
That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads.
I’m more concerned about the way copyright itself may need to change to work sensibly with this — according to several UK lawyers I’ve talked to, under UK law any work is copyrighted the moment it is put down in a fixed medium. For example, this comment, the moment it is recorded to any database or cache. It is not a sensible rule as-written, and common law saying “now now, don’t be silly” is the only reason things are not already out of hand. Unfortunately most of the EU isn’t common law and one of the few countries which is is the one which is about to leave. It might be fine, but I can’t tell. I only speak English, mediocre German, and tourist/subtourist French and Greek.
> For example, this comment, the moment it is recorded to any database or cache. It is not a sensible rule as-written, and common law saying “now now, don’t be silly” is the only reason things are not already out of hand.
It's the same in civil law countries, and the real reason things aren't out of hand is that every site that allows arbitrary users to upload content has some legal boilerplate such as
By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
> That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads.
This is likely very naive of me to ask but is it actually O(n*m)?
I don't know how the fingerprinting works but if it's anything like a hash I don't see why it couldn't be closer to O(n+m) since you only have to hash each copyrighted video once and then compare O(m) uploaded videos against the hashes.
I can imagine you can't actually compare against hashes of all copyrighted videos in O(1) since they can't just be kept in memory but I don't see why it can't be done in O(log n).
Of course this is very far out of my expertise so please someone explain to me why this is completely wrong =]
Hm, good point. I was thinking of the case of manual checking, but good point nonetheless.
Of course, the checksum would have to be invariant to pitch shift, rotation, horizontal flipping, framing, clipping, and length changes — all of which I know have been used to evade copyright filters on YouTube. (Also must resist mild noise audio or visual noise, mild convolution filters, and probably hue shifting, but I don’t know if those have been used by pirates yet)
I'd hope (?) that one outcome is 3rd party sass companies which are willing to do this screening (ala Sift Science) and potentially even insure to handle the risk (ala Climate Corp, which offers farmers insurance based on the outcomes of its models). If the EU has these laws, this could be a solid business model.
Yes, this can make jobs, and also some individuals very wealthy, but this is a net loss for the users of the internet: just another channel controlled by profit-seeking corporate motives.
> 3rd party sass companies which are willing to do this screening
That’s not a technology business. It’s more like insurance. The principal balance sheet item would be legal liability. As a result, legal costs would be high. You’d need to capture most of publishers’ revenues, I think, to make the books balance.
You'd probably see search engines & other traffic generators (e.g. reddit) simply vertically integrating into news itself, which nobody wants.
For example, Microsoft already owns CBS interactive and would push more news traffic there with Bing results, rather than pay a link tax to third parties.
Those companies already exist (they're intermediaries between large publishers and YT) and all they bring to the table is yet another layer of "it's not my fault, the computer says no" indirection and blame shifting. They add another huge source of false positives which will delete what you create with no accountability.
Pre-screening is a huge burden indeed. Yet if we start with the assumption that copyright law is good in principle, I can sort of see the point of copyright holders:
That burden or identifying infringing content exists no matter what. Right now, it falls on the creators to patrol the internet and play wack-a-mole with infringing uploads.
I can't really come up with an argument why creators should be saddled with that effort, when they get nothing out of it by default. Whereas all the profits accrue with the platforms.
It also seems trivially obvious that it's far easier for a platform to run some algorithm on their content, than it is for every single photographer and/or musician, author, etc. The latter would require an effort on the scale of Googlebot.
If youtube wants to profit from the possibilities new technology creates, they are on the hook to create the concomitant tools to prevent harms. It's no different than, say, an inventor pushing a new method to synthesize insulin being responsible for its safety. If it's impossible to do so, they can't just throw up their hands, point to their best effort, and tell patients to "take adequate precautions".
> Are we going back to the point where only a handful of content producers exist and everybody else should be content just consuming it?
YouTube could just block non-local content to users in the EU and charge content providers in the EU an upload fee. The upload fee could be made low enough so as to not be intrusitive (or incubate competition) but high enough to cover a good fraction of the additional costs.
But I don't think it's a problem solvable by more money... The upload fee would just funnel to legal costs, since no one has anything better than content id, and europe is saying that content id isn't good enough.
Thanks, that was a dumb mistake on my part... And a mistake I wouldn’t make if I could rely on a third party to build and run a datacenter for me. I’m not interested in building a datacenter.
most people do need middlemen though. if you require everybody to host their own content on their own websites, you go back to the old days of the internet where the only content was published by nerds. which had a certain charm, but was a lot smaller and less inclusive than today's internet.
Problem is no one wants to be a pipe. Imagine what Twitter could have been if they had accepted this vision instead of turning into yet another media company that sells ads. Even ISPs are trying to be media companies.
there's no reason someone couldn't make a small bit of desktop software which, fed AWS/Azure/GCP/DO/github pages/etc credentials, set up every aspect of a website, and automatically synced some local directory of content to the relevant site.
>there's no reason someone couldn't make a small bit of desktop software which, fed AWS/Azure/GCP/DO/
The gp (notatoad) mentioned technical skill as a barrier and you responded to that point but easy-to-use idiot-proof software isn't really the issue.
The bigger problem(s) mega-sites like Youtube solves is financial.
When one uploads a video to Youtube, it doesn't matter if it gets 0 views or 1 billion views. The cost is the same to the uploader: $0. Hosting it on one's own with AWS/Azure/GCP/DigitalOcean/etc will have variable egress costs and budgeting/forecasting a potential expense of thousands of dollars is not something regular people want to tackle. (The difficulty of this should be apparent from the stories of sophisticated tech geeks getting blindsided by unexpected AWS bandwidth bills.) The other option of placing a bandwidth limit to cap the costs means you create a different problem: a popular video will result in web surfers seeing annoying "bandwidth exceeded" error messages.
Another financial problem Youtube addresses is monetization. Hosting it on a self-managed cloud means less opportunities for ad revenue. Yes, a lot of HN despise ads but many uploaders of desirable video content like the ad payouts.
>Hosting it on one's own with AWS/Azure/GCP/DigitalOcean/etc will have variable egress costs and budgeting/forecasting a potential expense of thousands of dollars is not something regular people want to tackle.
Peer-to-peer distribution systems like BitTorrent, IPFS, and Dat are a good solution to this; distribution actually gets easier and cheaper as demand for a file increases.
Then you run into the opposite problem: if a video is not popular (which applies to most videos), P2P distribution relies on the uploader continually seeding it. That requires disk space to spare, fast upload speeds (since making viewers wait to start watching the video would be a massive downgrade from YouTube), and an always-on computer of some sort — which, if you don’t own a desktop PC (and aren’t a nerd who already has a NAS at home), needs to be a new purchase.
I’d like to see a hybrid solution that combines the best of both worlds: for “base load”, there’s be a decentralized market to pay for storage and seeding, ala Filecoin; for videos that become popular, viewers would also automatically seed while and after they watch them. Actually, I’d be shocked if there wasn’t already an ICO or two with this exact idea. (Googled it; more like five.) We’ll see if anything actually takes off.
Still, it’s going to take a lot to beat YouTube’s offer. $0 to have unlimited videos stored forever, re-encoded in various quality levels, and streamed to anyone on demand via a fast CDN – with no ads, unless you choose to enable them on your video in exchange for a cut of revenue. And it’s not like that’s only possible because Google’s unsustainably throwing money in a hole. While they don’t disclose revenue or cost figures, rumors hold that YouTube is anywhere from breaking even to already profitable, and it’s certainly meant to be a profit source in the future. It’s a classic example of an economy of scale. YouTube is certainly losing money on the long tail of videos, but in exchange they get all the popular videos on their platform, which make enough money to pay for everything. It’s hard for decentralized to compete with that. Less hard as costs go down over time, perhaps – but still hard.
> if you require everybody to host their own content on their own websites, you go back to the old days of the internet where the only content was published by nerds. which had a certain charm, but was a lot smaller and less inclusive than today's internet.
I'm afraid it's mostly inclusive in the sense of "you're included in the menu" rather than "you're included in the dinner guest list". It's easier than ever to be a human battery for someone else's social media machine. Not sure it's a good thing. I don't see it equivalent to running your own website in the "old days" in any but most superficial ways.
Seeing how some of the non-technical people use Facebook is just soul-crushing.
Even when people are fairly technical, many do not seem to realize the psychological costs to them individually, and social costs to everyone around them collectively.
Eventually, people will have to run ads on their own websites, the same as before Youtube. There will be a lot less video content because serving video is a tough thing.
It won't be so cheap if those cloud providers have to charge you the cost of the liability they're incurring for your potential copyright infringement.
You're absolutely right! It's certainly going to become cheaper and easier to host video!
With that said, is it perhaps possible that the problems publishers of content struggle with are in the main not those of the nuts and bolts of publishing? Perhaps, even, that these problems (content discovery, gaining access to users, analytics, ad management) might be well-addressed by platforms?
We could start a company that indexes websites so that they can be discovered. To help them monetize their content, we could also design an advertising platform that didn't require any special contracts or business clout to join. An advertising platform that was based on the words on the webpage - we could use it to fund the discovery side of our business. Let me call up my Stanford buddies and we'll get going. I know a guy named Eric that might like this idea.
The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado.
But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will surely meet the propeller. No amount of regulation can change fundamental economic facts. Once Google News starts going black around EU, and the search engine traffic & revenue disappearing from the publishers, I am sure they will be soon very eager to license their content at zero cost, or less.
I agree, and also think it's very easily worked around in a way that is detrimental to publishers.
If I were in the shoes of a Google News product manager, my take would be, "Fine, I won't show your snippets then." I'd show a summary and then headline links to the various news sources. (Or if that's too much for the law, just links with the title of the paper.)
The number of news stories is small enough that the bulk of summaries could be quickly written by humans. But I suspect Google has enough ML magic that they can easily generate adequate summaries for most articles, with a small team of humans that reviews and improves prominent ones.
This would be just as good from the consumer perspective, and it's another opportunity for Google to build up a data-driven moat. But from the newspaper perspective, they lose out: anything that makes their voice unique or distinctive will get squeezed out. It would further commodify news, which is the last thing newspapers want.
Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers?
Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem?
I don't see anything magic about Google News that isn't done better (Apple News), or more thoroughly (Twitter) elsewhere.
> Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem?
You should read up on the german Leistungsschutzrecht-Saga from a few years back. The media industry was lobbying for years to get Google to pay for showing links and snippets to their content in Google News. When the legislation finally passed Google offered publishers the option to delist them from Google News (not search) or keep showing their results while waiving their right to get paid. They all chose the latter thereby rendering the very same legislation they have been pushing for so long useless. Absolutely absurd.
They are referring to news snippets that show up in Google Search (not the Google News app on your phone). Those are one of the most significant sources of traffic for publishers.
Even for a web search, Google News doesn't show snippets at all anymore, just headlines and thumbnails. (This is in the "Top Stories" widget and on the "News" tab.)
It looks like the snippet is still there for generic web results, but that's further down the page for a news search and probably not a big driver of traffic.
The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.
Apple News is awful. Worse, you can't uninstall it on MacOS. Since when is it OK for machines built for professionals like the MacBook Pro to come with crapware, let alone uninstallable crapware?
The problem though is not that aggregators link to the news articles, but the concern of them containing so much
And if Google are making a profit by bringing eyeballs to their site using other people's content, shouldn't it be up to the people who created that content to choose how to negotiate that? They're free to let Google take the content for free / pay Google to take the content if they want, unless there's something in article 11 that I've missed.
If they already have the ability and protection for all of this, what difference does the legislation make? If not, how do they already have this freedom?
What do you mean by "freedom to extract money"? Charge and negotiate? If they don't have the right to negotiate fees for commercial use of their content, that sounds like quite a large missing part that needed adding.
Can you explicitly put down a case of something they couldn't do, but now can, and why you think that's a concern? Because I honestly just don't understand the point that people are trying to make with this.
They want google to continue to index them, and to be paid for that. They have 0 leverage to pull that off, so they’re using the legislature to accomplish it.
> No amount of regulation can change fundamental economic facts.
You know, you should take a course in law. Usually they're given by people with relatively high positions in the justice system. And then, not in the first class, but say the 10th lesson, ask the professor.
"Do tell, prof, do you think lawmakers actually do a good job ?"
And I would expect you then get a 45 minute rant about just how inconsistent, unrealistic, constantly violating basic legal principles, ... lawmakers are. Including several horror stories.
One example given was equality between men and women. Now don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in favor of equality. In marriage, this is pretty new. Unfortunately there's entire books full of laws about how to apply the previous non-equal rules to children, houses, debts, cars, fines, ... and so on and so forth. And the marriage equality law, surely it tells judges how all the other applications of marriage and divorce law now applies, right ?
Heh.
No it doesn't. So we get decades of inconsistent, per-state, ... judgements that get criticized for being, well inconsistent, cruel, corrupt, ... by those very same lawmakers.
This situation reminds me of Google Shopping...used to be completely free to post products and get them included in the search results as "snippets". Now it's 100% paid, and expensive.
Google News may go dark, but I wonder if they won't come up with some nice new ad format for publishers to feed their stories into, for a market based price, of course.
Or maybe not? I mean Bing, et. al. would kill to dominate one area of search, and MS has burned billions so far with middling success. What's a few more $B if you can get dominance in the EU?
Trading one monopoly for another may be exactly what the TradMed has been wanting - with the carrot that they'll switch back if "the price is right".
Google is very much more than an aggregator. They've invented a proprietary standard (AMP) which they then strong-arm publishers to use, and is only beneficial to publishers when hosted on google's platform. They're forcing publishers to give up their content in order to play the game. I hope the US FTC+DOJ is paying attention.
Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. Even if Google links to a news site, I won’t click. It’s probably 30 secs for my new iPhone to partially fail loading, abruptly reload, and then auto play video I didn’t ask for... while covering the article with more ads that I have to click to dismiss.
Reading about the latest headlines is like sitting in a timeshare presentation, only it drains my phone battery and crashes my browser.
It’s a shame that the media is so bad at producing media. The quality is down, the delivery is terrible, and they want more money.
Browsing the commercial web without a host of filtering is like having unprotected intercourse with random strangers. Ad blockers will take care of the advertising, auto-playing video won't auto-play if there is no auto-play to begin with, Javascript is blocked by uBlock in 'advanced user' mode or by using a browser like Privacy Browser which blocks it by default (and allows per-site exceptions to be made). Sometimes there's nothing left after that, true, but mostly it reduces the ad-infested misery to manageable proportions. This works on Android, it might work on iOS as well. Then again, it might not given the limited choice of browsers on that platform.
To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time.
>To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time.
it also locks you into a bubble of your own creation with very little provocative or interesting content
It would only do that if you limit your feed selection to your 'bubble', something you should not do. Add feeds which oppose your view to get a more balanced diet. This greatly expands the 'bubble' to the point of it no longer being discernible. Of course you can only read a limited number of articles in a given time frame but you'll have a much larger body of articles to choose from than those who rely on a single source.
To the parent poster, what is your solution to escaping the 'bubble'? I do hope you're not relying on any profiling search engines (Google, Bing, etc) or ditto news aggregator (or, ${deity} forbid, Facebook) for that purpose as these actually reinforce the bubble perspective by expressly showing you material deemed to coincide with your viewpoints.
Google's answer to this is a trifecta of AMP [1], Contributor [2], and Funding Choices [3] -- to deliver content signed by the publisher [4] from Google's CDN and display less-annoying ads in the meantime, or purchase an ad-free pass to the publisher through Google.
This venture is predicated on the assumption that Google and the publishers both need each other: publishers want revenue from ads, revenue whose amount is proportional to the number of viewers, while Google wants quality destinations to which it can direct traffic and/or quality sources of content which it can display in a captive newsreader.
This is a reality in a world where paid newspaper subscriptions are down, media makes money with just-in-time auctioned online display ads, and paywalls interfere with the positive effects of wide distribution, like the likelihood of new customer acquisition.
It's a shame that google, the internet's largest advertising company, has done so little to help this. Instead of addressing the problem the hard way by talking to advertisers and, you know, using people skills, they approach it through engineering ways that push the problem to someone else: AMP, Lighthouse, speed-based pagerank, etc. Google is perpetuating this problem by whining about it but not actually addressing it any meaningful way.
> Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer.
But that's an effect, though maybe one that will create a vicious cycle. It's not the cause. The revenue rug was pulled out from under local news websites, and they're struggling to keep the lights on. Advertising and tracking are how everyone says you need to make money on the internet nowadays, and they're just following the example set by Google, Facebook, et al.
Focusing too much local news site's advertising and tracking practices is missing the elephant in the room.
If local news is left to die, there will be little to no media oversight or local government. What happens in state legislatures is important, etc. If you require all these small organizations to have two competencies, you're going to get a lot more government corruption.
Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet.
You're completely right about the absolutely critical importance of a free, open, and brave press. Yet it's possible that this particular business problem, the one you have so wisely and correctly pointed to, is not novel. Newspapers historically have found a variety of ways to fund their operations. I hope they can continue to exhibit the entrepreneurial spirit that helps keep a vibrant press free!
> Local news organizations have always been required to maintain two competencies - advertising and journalism. This predates Google News, Google, and indeed the internet.
3. Distribution.
News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone.
> News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone.
A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media need to find a viable business model) is that our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system. Capitalism is given a higher priority than democracy.
> our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system
Plenty of countries get around this with independent but government funded media, the BBC in the UK, ABC in Australia, etc. I guess NPR is probably the closest thing in the US. They do a better job at reporting the news than most commercial providers and their sites are a lot less crapware infested (but getting worse), compare this (https://www.abc.net.au/news/) to just about any commercial news organisation.
The only problem I've ever had with the ABC is that it's crap at local news.
> Plenty of countries get around this with independent but government funded media
Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at. I don't recall the conversation advancing in that direction very often.
> The only problem I've ever had with the ABC is that it's crap at local news.
I honestly think local news is the main problem. I'm not super pessimistic about the NYT, the WSJ, or the Washington Post. They have the prestige and the reach to attract lots of subscribers and/or patrons, and they're big enough to invest heavily in technology. It's the small local and regional papers that worry me. The staff per eyeball to cover all their beats is probably a lot less favorable, and they don't have much prestige to draw on to attract other support.
> Capitalism is given a higher priority than democracy.
Given the American historical experience with politically aligned papers, I think we might be well-advised to consider the failure modes of state-owned media. To put it another way, we rely on capitalism to support democracy because the alternatives we've tried did not produce a vibrant, independent media. Instead, they produces one bound and beholden to our politics.
Have you ever wondered what the "Free" in "Detroit Free Press" referred to?
But, let's skip past that for the moment. Let's assume that infinite independence is possible. How does one go about having effective press at the required local level in a cost-effective way? Being cost-effective is pretty important for anything that might need to function without being profitable, after all.
Advertising is different from Javascript. Advertising can simply be a load of images that are easy to render, as in traditional periodicals.
Web pages suck because it's easier for a site to instruct the client to download and run analytics software from 3rd parties, instead of doing that work server side.
> Advertising is different from Javascript. Advertising can simply be a load of images that are easy to render, as in traditional periodicals. Web pages suck because it's easier for a site to instruct the client to download and run analytics software from 3rd parties, instead of doing that work server side.
My understanding is that one thing that Google, Facebook, and the internet as a whole have done is to make online advertising an incredibly high-volume, low-margin business. Trackerless banner ads pay almost nothing. Trackers push the margins up, but Google and Facebook suck up most of the air in that room.
I think the author has a good grasp of the situation that is more important than the average person understands. Murdoch knows his empire is waning and is attempting to ingratiate himself to government officials by becoming an unofficial mouthpiece of several conservative governments. His coup d'etat would be if he is able to turn that relationship official in some regions, pass laws to make his content mandatory to publish, them extract a link tax from the distributors. An irony of ironies considering he will build that on the back of ideogolgy that fundamentally criticizes this strategy.
Note: An exceptionally well written analysis that shows the author has a good understanding of both product and business motivations. It is so rare to see writing like this in the era of outrage journalism.
> His coup d'etat would be if he is able to turn that relationship official in some regions
“In Germany, a comparable anti-snippet law was rendered powerless by a group of publishers who did the math and offered their content for free in exchange for the usual stream of clicks sent back to them” [1]. In summary, this law has made having access to Google more valuable.
I think if pressure from "traditional" publishers keeps going, google is going to put plan B in action and go on to actually own the news as well. It's not hard for them to build an "uber for news" for journalists, editors and the common man, as in fact they have been subsidizing the open web with adsense for decades anyway. Maybe the next google reader will be about google's own news.
The problem with that plan is that if Google were to release such a service in the EU, the EU would then fine Google for using their search monopoly to prop up a service in another industry (News). The EU did something similar when Google used their search monopoly to promote Google Shopping.
Sure, but if google decides to pull out of european news, someone else might find it an attractive idea. And , considering that (if this passes) EU will have made it impossible for a european company to do that, it will be somewhere outside the EU.
What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights.
As the article states, this is the exact thing that happened in Spain and Germany, with the result being that the major publishers folded. Which is an argument that "make google pay" idea is futile and doomed from the beginning; the publishers can't make google pay simply because they need google far more than google needs them.
The analogy is quite difficult. A television station is a well defined legal and technical object with a licensing regime, a standardized image format etc. A cable network is, by definition a transmission infrastructure designed to carry a number of such signals.
A "news website" and "news agregator" are... what exactly? Since search traffic is so valuable, publishers would modify their sites readily to fall just under the legal threshold for news sites in order to get picked up by Google's non-aggregator of non-news sites. It's virtually impossible to craft definitions that are simultaneously not trivial to circumvent by Google and also have no impact on established, unrelated internet content.
What's stopping Google is that they would lose out on advertising revenue, and drive users to other search engines which do serve links to news media sites.
In practice, people trust Google more than hey trust the news site. Google News in Spain was shut down in 2014. Google dominates search engine market share in Spain today and for every period from 2014 to 2018.
As usual with upcoming legislation, FUD predominates in the conversation. A reasonable person may be used to parties with vested interests to exaggerate or misrepresent facts, but it's unfortunate when parties from whom you may not expect a clear bias continue to perpetuate uncertainty and doubt.
Article 13 states that the measures to seek rightholder approval for user-submitted content "shall be effective and proportionate, taking into account, among other factors" the nature and size of services, whether they're a small and medium business, the sheer volume of material uploaded, and the cost burden of such an effort.
Furthermore, it refers to a precise definition of the sort of enterprise that is to be impacted by this regime -- those that provide "public access to a large amount of works or other subject-matter uploaded by its users which it organises and promotes for profit-making purposes", exempting a variety of others. This leaves ample leeway to require a more rigorous scheme from hosts as big as YouTube while being more lenient with a hobbyist forum.
Article 11 states that the copyright protection of journalistic articles from aggregators will expire at the end of the following year from the article's publication. It reaffirms the right of publishers to decide how they wish to profit from their work -- if they choose to make it available for the aggregator at no cost, that is their right as well.
> It reaffirms the right of publishers to decide how they wish to profit from their work -- if they choose to make it available for the aggregator at no cost, that is their right as well.
That's exactly what the Spanish law has forbidden, with disastrous effects for local media when Google withdrew. I'm not familiar with the text of the Article 11 proposals, but I doubt it includes provisions excluding such a transposition into national law; it's obviously the only way for any implementation of the directive to have any teeth.
Of course, the immediate effect is that the aggregators would refuse to pick any local content and would display only 3rd party sites, from outside the countries afflicted with the toxic link syndrome.
OK could you point to anything that outlines actual criteria for classification because the language you included from Article 13 in your comment is not restrictive in any manner.
Original text [1], changed by amendments [2]. Relevant definition:
Amendment 150, Proposal for a directive, Article 2 – paragraph 1 – point 4b (new):
> 'online content sharing service provider' means a provider of an information society service one of the main purposes of which is to store and give access to the public to a significant amount of copyright protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users, which the service optimises and promotes for profit making purposes. Microenterprises and small-sized enterprises within the meaning of Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC and services acting in a non-commercial purpose capacity such as online encyclopaedia, and providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned, such as educational or scientific repositories, shall not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive. Providers of cloud services for individual use which do not provide direct access to the public, open source software developing platforms, and online market places whose main activity is online retail of physical goods, should not be considered online content sharing service providers within the meaning of this Directive;
Youtube will arbitrarily deprioritize, demonetize, or remove content from its platform, and as with all of Google, the appeals process is slow and questionable. Since it exercises so much curation power over the content on its platform, it should likewise be liable for said content. Protection from liability for content on your platform should only be extended to platforms that actually act as common carriers.
"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google."
It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case.
I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them.
I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks.
Do most other people use aggregators or "search" for news?
People Google the news when there's a major event going on that they want to know more about but don't usually read the news. For example, I did so to find out the 2018 US midterm results.
Some people use aggregators on purpose, because it gives them a broad-spectrum view. Some use aggregators unintentionally, considering Google-searching text boxes have replaced URL bars in all major browsers and platforms over the last decade.
I'm pretty reliant on an RSS reader. I rarely use Bing News/Google News/etc. unless I'm curious about a breaking story that isn't covered in my subscribed feeds (which are mostly tech news.) The other place I end up picking up a lot of news is Twitter, and of course, here on HN.
Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.
> Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.
I'm not sure if that makes sense as a strategy. By relying on aggregators (that aren't human curated like Apple News), you're just getting the sources that do the best SEO. If your aggregator does algorithmic curation, they'll build an echo chamber for you.
I think if you want to avoid falling into an echo chamber, it's best to identify a couple of high-quality news sources with different perspectives, and read them unselectively. Say two national newspapers with different political orientations, an international newspaper, and a local newspaper.
I don't search for news in the general term, but sometimes when you google famous people news articles are among the results. Those could also be, say, an earth quake in tahity when you google tahity.
if you re searching for (or something) someone public you re likely to encounter news articles about them, many of them, and you usually read multiple to find what u re looking for. That creates a lot of traffic.
Most news sites have comment sections. I am wondering if someone could post copyrighted material on purpose in the comment section and use the new EU law to sue publishers.
This makes complete sense to me. There is no reason that posting content to a platform that millions of people could see should be free or instant. Other publishing platforms take responsibility for their content, and it costs them money that Google isn't spending, because it would rather spend it on legal on the back end.
I wonder if any platform has ever created a moderation system that can acheive this scale. I imagine it would require captcha like screening process with multiple tiers of moderator specialization and appeals.
> There is no reason that posting content to a platform that millions of people could see should be free or instant.
So if someone is on a particular platform, such as the one we're currently using, and they post a base64 encoded image, or article, or whatever...
...you really want every possible comment screened, paid for, or be delayed in some manner so someone or something can check that the data is legit?
That can't work; sure you could probably figure a way to work around the base64 encoding and automate things, but what happens if people start using other more difficult encoding systems to publish such content in text-only forums?
Yes, this is reducto-ad-absurdum territory - but these kinds of directives would have to apply to every kind of user-generated and posted content system, including mostly or wholly text-only boards like this one.
I am not talking about automating things, but rather setting up a system of self-governance. What if posting a video required you to review other peoples' videos to earn the right to post? And if you deviate from the majority opinion you get penalized? Like captcha, this would solve a problem by aligning incentives and solving a massive problem with a massively distributed workforce of real people doing small tasks.
There is no conceivable way random consumers can identify whether a random video violates someone else's copyright. Every consumer would somehow have to be familiar with every video in existence, and who owns it, who they've licensed it to, and all those people's identities on every platform.
Imagine if making your comment here required you to investigate the originality of several other comments and whether the posters may have posted similar things elsewhere under other names, or licensed someone else's content, or violated someone else's copyright. Would you still bother posting?
If you can't trust a user to identify copyright violations in someone else's work then you probably should blindly host content created by that user either. I think people would learn how copyright works so that they can prove it and earn the right to post on a platform with massive distribution.
And article 13 is not only for Google... Copyright scanning is hard and there government requires 100% recall, which can only be achieved by shutting down the site.
IMO the government receives the criticism and just redirects the fire towards big ones.
After numerous sites will have to block access to them for users coming from Europe, even if it is for a short while to implement tools to comply with these regulations, people will not start to hate them, they won't start hating Google, Youtube or whatever site they are barred from accessing, they will start to hate the EU. Anti-EU sentiment will get a big boost and they can't blame anyone else than themselves, good job and good luck bureaucrats.
This article is a one sided look at how publishers benefit from Google without considering the other side, at all. This is not helpful for informed discussion.
If Google is 'helping' these publishers then the counterpoint is these publishers are also 'helping' Google by making the content at their cost in the first place. Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, blogs?
Without news content google search users will not get news context about their search queries so the search engine will lack a critical perspective and become lower quality, which will take billions of dollars of value off Google, lower its value to users and make room for other options.
Let's not pretend Google is not benefiting from news content. And since people clearly value news content producers can generate value outside of Google, and Google will need to pay to make money from that content or do without. Targeting a predatory model will make space for better models and ideas to emerge.
> If Google is 'helping' these publishers then the counterpoint is these publishers are also 'helping' Google by making the content at their cost in the first place. Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, one person blogs?
The whole rest of the internet, which among other things contains a sizable number of media outlets that are not subject to these protections?
Frankly, Google is better-equipped to walk away from news providers than the news providers are to walk away from google. Google has done this before, even.
You are, of course, absolutely right that there is room for another business model here. In fact, one might posit that there has been room for decades! Surely it's possible that there could be a business model whereby consumers get access to the news they value for a reasonable price, producers of news get paid fairly, and profit-extracting aggregators are kept to the slimmest of financial margins. Surely it would be better for consumers (who doesn't like supporting journalism, so critical to a free society?) and journalistic outlets (who obviously would love to be free of Google's iron yoke)!
It's curious that no good replacement has arisen when the opportunity and incentives are so clear! Perhaps in Spain, where Google News does not operate on domestic newspapers and has not for years? But I'm sure that's merely my failure to understand how Google sucked all the oxygen out of the room and prevented those incentivized to do so from creating something better. Can you help me understand what I've missed?
> Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, blogs?
I hope so. The internet was better when news was an afterthought.
> Without news content google search users will not get news context about their search queries so the search engine will lack a critical perspective and become lower quality,
News content is low quality content. It's toxic information pollution.
I wish google/youtube, facebook, reddit, etc would simply ban news company links. It would go a long way to increase quality content and lower toxicity.
Seems it's much easier to get some legislation passed than actually fix your business model. Everytime I come across an interesting news article and want to make a 10c donation, there's never an easy micropayment way to do it. Furthermore places like the wall street journal block their content and ask you to pay hundreds of dollars. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars just so I can speed-read a single article for 60 seconds.
Come on, media industry, get with the times and understand your target customer.
> By pushing to the “link tax”, publishers are shooting themselves in the foot three times over.
I don't think that's true at all. Beyond some short term traffic loss there are no negative consequences for the media industry if Google leaves this space. I suspect that's what big publishers actually aim for, they understand Google is not likely to pay and want to control how users discover news themselves.
The challenge publishers are fighting is effectively scabs in a union strike. If news publishers block Google, the one (or few) publisher who chooses not to gets all the traffic. And the problem with news is it's easily copied and redistributed. So the real reporters and journalists could all block Google and Google may try to sustain itself on pushing blogspam instead.
It's very possible that only government regulation which forces participation (such as the link tax) can actually work.
> It's very possible that only government regulation which forces participation (such as the link tax) can actually work.
Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? Why pretend it's anything else but Google directly paying for the news?
Side point, if news subscriptions were reasonably priced (upfront pricing, and billed monthly instead of this odd weekly nonsense), they would probably not care at all about Google.
Google brings traffic, traffic brings views, and views bring ad revenue. The number of media outlets, today or historically, that subsist entirely on subscriber numbers is tiny next to the amount that use subscriptions as well as ads.
Isn't this the same as the link tax? Except that the link tax clearly assigns the money to the news outlets who are actually producing the news people are reading on Google, whereas "every news org" is hard to quantify and discerning who should receive how much funding is a complicated question otherwise?
Is it possible people are opposed to the link tax not because of what it does, but the marketing they've been exposed to characterizing it as bad? Even the description "link tax" is oddly loaded, as "snippet tax" would be far more accurate, to that it applies to lifted content, not "literally the URL".
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that. They assume people only store audio on cds? So individuals/companies that were storing data on cd's were supporting the music industry?
I suppose my sarcasm wasn't indicated well enough. Google doesn't have any special duty to fund the news, anymore than Zuckerberg does personally, or George Soros, or any other financier. You can't just go around and demand someone pays for something you think is important.
The issue is that Google is, in fact, scraping news content and delivering it to users while cutting the creators of that news out of the revenue. Google doesn't have a "special duty" to fund the news, it has an obligation to pay for what it's taking, usually without permission to do so.
What are these "future tools" that Google is investing millions in for the industry? I am not sure what they could do to help? Putting back the search term in each click through?
If I were a policymaker and I had to choose between saving a free and independent press and saving a big advertising company, I know which side I'd be on.
Google provides a lot of traffic to the websites operated by the free and independent press. If they don't manage to monetize that traffic sufficiently then that's their problem. Google obeys robots.txt, if they don't want to be indexed it's easy to achieve this.
I really don't understand why Google should pay for what they do.
It is a permission culture mentality. It doesn't matter that you are making them money by say buying their hardware and painting it neon green to resell - you made more money from their work so they feel entitled to another cut.
Except it does the exact opposite of that. It is like a mudslide - burrying the small and leaving the giants diminished but lacking competition.
The point is that their childish fantasy of a policy will only hurt everyone except for those who long for a tightly controlled media oligarchy with moats protecting from competition.
It's funny, at first, I misread that you wrote "I know which side I'd bet on." Which raises an interesting question. We know which side we'd probably be on, that's the rationalist speaking. Which side would we bet on though? Specifically, which side does the realist bet on winning in both the short and long run?
Oh, I think it's pretty clear that Googbook has the legacy media at their mercy. The realist bet has been against responsible news media for almost long as that's even existed as a market segment.
Probably one of the most telling charts I saw was data extracted from a Google quarterly report[1], showing how much of their ad revenue has moved from ads embedded in pages (which they have to share with page owners), and ads in their own search engine and apps, which they get to keep 100% of. While Google used to be providing value to the sites it helped locate, more and more it's enriching itself at the cost of those sites.
If we can't realign their incentives with revenue sharing with news sites, we need to shut them down, because the way things are going, Google is bleeding out the journalism industry. They were in a symbiotic relationship, but it has transitioned to a parasitic one.
I think this is an interesting insight: Google is, in a way, competing with the pages it links to. If you can find the info you want, and click on an ad while still on a google owned domain: they make more money.
We've seem some shots fired in this battle already. In the earlier days of google search for something with a clear cut answer, and you'd likely see the answer in the summary. Sites missed out on that traffic so they started moving the answer lower down in the page, with poorly written teaser summaries in the results. Now google is showing a large block at the top of the page with it's guess to the answer at the top.
1) Any time somebody suggests taxing, breaking up, or otherwise regulating the tech giants, there's a chorus of voices afraid we'll kill their golden goose. That's why I phrased it as a choice to "save" one or the other. If it ever did come down to a binary choice, I'd sooner our society sacrificed Google to save NYT/BBC/Der Spiegel. Others may disagree, of course.
2) There's a legitimate argument to be made that government intervention to shore up the press will result in unintended consequences and/or make the press beholden to their government benefactors.
How does this conversation go? I mean, seriously, were people sitting in a room thinking, ok, so Google gives us free advertisement, but what if we were to get them to pay us to advertise for us? And everyone just nods and agrees? What the heck?
Greed. Everywhere. You just can't escape it. I'm so disappointed in people these days.
Giving companies direct liability for policing copyright in user-uploaded content is a much bigger disaster, on two separate fronts, both highly damaging:
1) Implementing youtube-style content id will be a huge burden for small companies. Youtube reportedly spent tens of millions on it over several years. This tilts the field in favor of large incumbents even more than it already is by nature. While the amount of content to screen is really small, human-driven filtering is a possibility, but as soon as you need to scale up you're screwed. Any startup in Europe that needs to do this is a no-go from now on, IMO.
2) Back to that multi-milion content ID system: it sucks. It sucks really badly. It over-reports infringement left right and center. Now imagine what it will be like when youtube is liable a priori for every false negative; any sane legal department is going to demand a minimal number of false negatives at any cost. Now imagine what that will do to the false positive rate. Now imagine what the false positive rate will be when every site has to bodge together a similar system, with neither google's money nor google's technical expertise.
The second point has been missed by most criticism of the Copyright Directive, and to me it's the biggest problem of all. I fear the wasteland that will result. Are we going back to the point where only a handful of content producers exist and everybody else should be content just consuming it? Welcome to the 20th century, Europe.