THIS CONTENT NOT AVAILABLE IN FRANCE - Ruling forces Google to negotiate monetary terms on news snippets

[rcmaehl]

Sources:
Engadget

Techcrunch (Quote source)

Reuters
 

Summary:
France has forced Google to negotiate payments for news snippets from France news sources.

 

Quotes/Excerpts:

TechCrunch said:

France’s competition authority has ordered Google to negotiate with publishers to pay for reuse of snippets of their content...such as can be displayed in its News...Service or...via Google Search. The country was the first of the EU...to transpose the neighbouring right for news into national law, following the passing of a pan-EU copyright reform. Among various controversial measures the reform included a provision to extend copyright to cover content such as the ledes of news stories. A handful of individual EU Member States, including Germany and Spain, had previously passed similar laws...without successfully managing to extract payments. In Spain, for example, which made payments to publishers mandatory, Google instead chose to pull the plug on its Google News service entirely. Nonetheless, Google has continued to talk tough over paying for this type of content. "We sell ads, not search results, and every ad on Google is clearly marked. That’s also why we don’t pay publishers when people click on their links in a search result.” It has also since changed how Google News displays content in France, showing headlines and URLs only. However France’s competition authority has slapped down the tactic, taking the view that Google’s unilateral withdrawal of snippets to deny payment is likely to constitute an abuse of a dominant market position. The authority cites Google’s unilateral withdrawal of “longer display article extracts, photographs, infographics and videos within its various services, unless the publishers give it free authorization” as unfair behavior. Hence issuing an emergency order, which gives Google three months to negotiate “in good faith” with press agencies and publishers to pay for reusing bits of their content. Abusive practices the agency says it suspects Google of at this stage of its investigation are: The imposition of unfair trading conditions; circumvention of the law; and discrimination. The order requires Google to display news snippets during the negotiation period...while terms agreed via the negotiation process will apply retrospectively. Google is also required to send in monthly reports on...implementing the decision.

 

My Thoughts:
I can understand that news companies are afraid that the snippets will sum up an article so much that a person won't read the article, however, an alternative argument can be made that if your article can be summarized with only one or two sentences that it's a poor article.

[Lurick]

I have to side with Google on this one. Snippets do not give the full picture or come close to summing up a good article and if anything they serve to drive more traffic to news sites who then hamstring themselves by failing to monetize that traffic or put everything behind an arbitrary paywall causing users to go elsewhere.

[rcmaehl]

Obviously we just need to ban French Users from accessing the Tech News Section.

[jagdtigger]

And make ppl aware in France why it happened....

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, rcmaehl said:

I can understand that news companies are afraid that the snippets will sum up an article so much that a person won't read the article, however, an alternative argument can be made that if your article can be summarized with only one or two sentences that it's a poor article.

But Google is making money from something you wrote while you are not.

1 hour ago, Lurick said:

I have to side with Google on this one. Snippets do not give the full picture or come close to summing up a good article and if anything they serve to drive more traffic to news sites who then hamstring themselves by failing to monetize that traffic or put everything behind an arbitrary paywall causing users to go elsewhere.

Still... is it fair for Google to profit from someone else's work? If it is, why are other copyright violations not also allowed? Is this only acceptable when it's a megacorporation doing it?

56 minutes ago, rcmaehl said:

Obviously we just need to ban French Users from accessing the Tech News Section.

I don't make money when I post in the Tech News section, do you?

 

And before someone brings it up, LMG barely makes enough from ads here to keep the forum up. They don't turn a profit either.

[Lurick]

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Still... is it fair for Google to profit from someone else's work? If it is, why are other copyright violations not also allowed? Is this only acceptable when it's a megacorporation doing it?

How are they making money by pushing traffic to your site by aggregating information? Might as well say you can copyright words in the dictionary and their definitions by this point. Just because you write something doesn't mean you should automatically own everything about it, ownership culture is destroying a lot of great works because of this type of thinking.

 

Edit:

And how do you know they are profiting from aggregating news snippets into a feed? Do you have a P&L sheet that breaks this down?

[Sauron]

Just now, Lurick said:

How are they making money by pushing traffic to your site by aggregating information?

Google actively makes money from people using their services by collecting their search habits. They use it to tailor their own advertisements and they sell it to other companies that do the same. That's not (usually) the case for an RSS reader. Not to mention websites can decide whether they want to offer an RSS service.

3 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Might as well say you can copyright words in the dictionary and their definitions by this point.

You can definitely copyright dictionary definitions. They're your writing just as a book or article would be.

 

Personally I think copyright should be abolished so I don't think it's good that you can do that - but I also think it's unfair that a company like Google which, in some cases, uses copyright to their advantage should also be able to ignore it when it suits them.

6 minutes ago, Lurick said:

Just because you write something doesn't mean you should automatically own everything about it, ownership culture is destroying a lot of great works because of this type of thinking.

Current copyright law does say that. Maybe if it starts getting in the way of entities with real money we'll start making some progress towards changing it.

[jagdtigger]

43 minutes ago, Sauron said:

But Google is making money from something you wrote while you are not.

Fun fact, when you tap on a card in news it will open the site that has the article. (Which also means it will show the ads so the author makes money.)

[Sauron]

28 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Fun fact, when you tap on a card in news it will open the site that has the article. (Which also means it will show the ads so the author makes money.)

sooo let the sites choose.

[FlappyBoobs]

Considering there is an EU wide law on this sort of thing I don't see it getting very far when challenged in the EU courts. 

 

The specific text is "Hyperlinks to news articles, accompanied by “individual words or very short extracts”, can be shared freely" so Google has the higher court on its side, so this will be interesting. 

[2FA]

Same thing happened in Spain already, Google decided to stop showing Spanish news sites altogether (except for search results of course).

[Teddy07]

I hope google wins and not this corrupt law pushed by a dieing industry

[Lurick]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

sooo let the sites choose.

They are, in almost all cases, of the mindset that they are owed money by Google/Amazon/etc for just existing. Google could literally put them at the top of the search results page and they would complain that Google needs to pay for the increased load on their network. They failed to capitalize on the traffic being sent to them and want money because they are fading out.

 

Edit:

Google tried this in Spain btw in 2014 and 2015 and the sites that didn't want to be listed or complained about being listed were removed and then they complained because they were removed and "Google was being unfair" to them in that regard as well. So Google put them back in but without snippets and they complained AGAIN because it wasn't fair they weren't getting traffic.

 

Edit 2:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study-spains-google-tax-news-shows-how-much-damage-it-has-done.shtml

A study in 2015 in Spain after they passed their law showed it did nothing but hurt the small publishers and resulted in less traffic and revenue overall for all news publications.

[Rohith_Kumar_Sp]

this is so fucking stupid, this is how google images is fucking useless right now, everything you ever know won't be the same becasue of the greedy few.