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.
All of the news site comment sections that I know of are pre-moderated.
The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
61–70 of 181 posts
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#62The 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 sur…
It's not about paying for traffic or links, it's about paying for the content Google copies and republishes.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
No because you can publish it yourself. We don't need giant middlemen to use the Internet.
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.
Alternatively: You create a market for better tools that make it easier for individuals and companies to self-publish.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#64I'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 conten…
No because you can publish it yourself. We don't need giant middlemen to use the Internet.
Are you planning to run your own T1 lines to the backbone when you're building your own datacenter to host one video?
We don't "need" them, sure, but we live in a society. We're supposed to be able to delegate work to others who specialize in doing it.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#65I'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 conten…
Where you see disasters, I see business oportunities.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#66Local 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 c…
> 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…
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.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#67Local 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 c…
> 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…
> The revenue rug was pulled out from under local news websites
More accurately, the revenue rug as pulled out from under local news print publications
Local news web sites could support journalism, but not with the anchor that is the print component.
So this has pushed local news into worse and more desperate monetization strategies.
What needs to happen is absolutely clear: local news organizations will have to shrink, significantly.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but... First: Google doesn't need saving . They're doing just fine. Second: I fear that every proposal to save a free and independent press is going to destroy freedom in some very concrete ways.
I think is is a fair response. 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 legitima…
Copyright has always been a government-backed scheme. Yet that has never stopped a publisher from being critical of the government.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 regulat…
> 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 probab…
> Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then?
That sounds sensible enough to me. As an example, Canada taxed blank CDs and CDR drives and distributed the revenue to their music industry.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#70The 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 sur…
This is essentially the argument laid out in stratechery: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-european-union-versus-the-i...
The link tax seems like wishful thinking on the part of the publishers - an attempt to legislate the market dynamics of yesteryear.