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The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

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Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#81
post #9

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 conten…

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".

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#83
post #9

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 conten…

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.

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.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#84
post #9

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 conten…

The weird thing is that Google previously and maybe still has enough cash around to simply buy the vast majority of the music and movie industry.

I just checked, they literally could buy most of the music and movie industry.

Problem solved

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#85
post #9

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 conten…

The Copyright Directive is a textbook example of regulatory capture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#86

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.

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 th…

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.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#87
post #12

"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…

Most people settle on a few trusted sources... after starting on Google and finding good info constantly from that source.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#88
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.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#89
post #9

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 conten…

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.

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.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#90
post #9

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 conten…

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.

> 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.

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