Canada’s government says it has reached a deal with Google for the company to contribute $100 million Canadian dollars annually to the country’s news industry
I agree that the decline of journalistic quality is bad for the world and would like a mechanism to improve it, but I have yet to read a convincing argument for why anyone should have to pay a fee to link to a news article. I could see an argument for reducing the amount of the content that can be republished as a preview under fair use, but nobody seems to want that.
There are three things I don’t like about that argument.
The idea that small excerpts of copyrighted works are fair use that don’t require licensing or payment is also widely-used in journalism.
At least in the case of Facebook, publishers get to decide what’s in the previews using open graph tags.
News organizations have not lobbied for general changes to fair use, but special legal status for themselves and a few tech companies. Laws centered around special status rather than broad principles tend not to work out well in the long term.
I agree that the decline of journalistic quality is bad for the world and would like a mechanism to improve it, but I have yet to read a convincing argument for why anyone should have to pay a fee to link to a news article. I could see an argument for reducing the amount of the content that can be republished as a preview under fair use, but nobody seems to want that.
Getting sick of saying that it’s not the link, it’s the preview.
There are three things I don’t like about that argument.
That’s not how the Canadian law was written. Google providing a link, even with no headline or preview, would still have to pay.