> While Canada's bill may not be well-tuned, it is a welcome first attempt.
First attempt for Canada maybe. Australia did it a few years ago:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56163550
The first draft of that law was initially written by the news companies themselves, and was a hilarious exercise in overreach. (For example, the first draft insisted news companies be allowed to edit joe citizens posts to the media companies Facebook page.) The version put before parliament was watered down and vague enough that after Facebook stopped posting Australian news, a compromise was reached that oddly didn't require a change to the legislation (and the media companies got far less).
But Australia wasn't the first either. The Australian media companies got their idea from the French(?):
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/21/google-agrees-to-pay-french-publishers-for-news.html
I agree with some other posters here. It's not welcome. It's a shakedown from dinosaurs grasping for straws, and to accommodate them the pollies stretched the definition of copyright even further.
It was obvious it wouldn't work, and clearly hasn't worked in Australia. The newspapers are still posting large losses, still shutting down newsrooms. It's inevitable they will disappear in their current form. The newspapers business wasn't selling news or doing investigations to create news. Their business is the same as Google's: selling ads. The news was always just the bait they used to get people to read their ads and they shamelessly copied it, often with only a few words changed, between mastheads. Each had their own little area they sold to, the size largely determined by how far you ship dead trees in about 6 hours. Now the BBC, CNN, The Guardian and the other remaining big ones can reach the entire world now, so we don't need thousands of little mastheads all repeating the same news items. These big news rooms do a far better job that the little ones at gathering news, and selling ads. And so, the little mastheads will die.
It's bad law because in order to cover this use case, they banned creating 10 or 20 word summaries of a 200 or 300 word article, expanding copyright accordingly. That had to do that because at least in Google's case, as all Google every did was post a few words and a link to the actual content, on the newspapers site. Copyright terms have already been stretched well beyond their utilitarian justification, probably by an order of magnitude. This stretches the definition of what is covered by copyright by a similar amount. Admittedly this stretch is fairly harmless here, but if it leaks into other domains we will have a mess on our hands.