111–120 of 156 posts
It would seem that Google could quickly kill this law by de-indexing all the relevant newspapers, right now. Why are they waiting?
Why would that kill the law? All it would do is make Google news useless for German news.
This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all for an even better cause.
German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.
I think there's a simple argument with content and markets that all of these media companies disingenuously ignore. If no-one is prepared to pay for your content then the market rate for your content is, by definition, zero. We pay in two ways - direct purchasing, and delivering surplus attention beyond that required to consume the media, which can be redirected towards various forms of advertising. When you cannot run your business on advertising revenue alone it means that not enough people are giving enough surplus attention of enough value to cover.
This argument about the "inherent value" of one form of content or another - of the need to pay artists or creators, or in this case journalists - doesn't extend to other realms. If I decide I want to be a carpenter, I cannot build a table and demand someone buy that table for $1,000. If the market won't bear that price for the table then the government isn't going to force others to pay me $1,000 because I feel that's what it's "worth".
The market rates for all forms of media have plummeted due to there being more supply of attention-draining media than there is demand either in terms of hard-dollars in direct payment, or surplus attention to be redirected towards paid advertising (and its ilk).
When old media companies had a stranglehold on distribution because paper production and distribution was expensive, or video production costs were prohibitive, only a small elite were able to publish their opinions, and the monopolistic distributors were able to charge a premium for the limited access to information or entertainment they provided. They weren't paid well because they provided an outstanding product (though it often was), they were paid well because they limited supply. Those limits are gone. Many many people produce entertainment and informational content. Many do it just for fun and are happy not to get paid. Many more do it with the hope of getting paid anything without the expectation of the lavish salaries and expense accounts of journalists of old.
This undercuts their economics and doesn't even touch on the fact that the newer voices often offer media that is more attractive to younger audiences. Not to mention declining quality of the product in many cases. Many media companies as they've become bloated monstrosities have undermined their own product quality with short-term-profit-focused decision making which had long term harm.
Is it really the case that piracy accounts for all problems in a record industry where the giants spent the pre-Internet-boom '90s crushing independent labels, monopolizing market channels and creating a modern-day payola system on radio where programming was rigidly sliced and diced to the lowest common denominator? Is none of the loss of popularity of the New York Times down to their abandoning their predominantly liberal subscriber audience during the Bush years and being guilty of mis-leading story after mis-leading story in the build up to the Iraq War, destroying people's confidence in their role as a reliable neutral arbiter?
tl;dr The publishers referenced by the OP aren't happy at the market rate for their product and services and want government to rig the market to pay them a cushy wage. Such subsidies rarely save industries in the long term, and the public should be outraged - because legislation of this sort is a public subsidy on a privileged elite in no uncertain terms.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if we're going to miss them when they're gone, then we should figure out a goddamned way to replace it, rather than saying, "The Internet is just too much revolution for you to handle, man." Full-time investigative journalism cannot go away, for the sake of society. It's a matter of how we will continue it, or what model and best practices will supplant it. iReport doesn't count.
I'm not sure we are going to miss them when they're gone. The point of Clay's article, as I read it, is that's their argument. In reality, I agree with Clay (and you, I think), which is to say that it isn't newpapers we might miss, but solid journalism. The interesting question is whether these are indpendent variables. I.e. could we have newspapers without good journalism and good journalism without newspapers. I th…
Newspapers and media companies, have had no problem killing off their news departments in the name of profits - eliminating foreign desks, reducing investigative reporting, focusing on lifestyle reportage and opinion pieces.
High quality opinion writers are finding success as bloggers - some are able to make a perfectly good living as such. They don't need the label of a newspaper to sit beneath any more.
There will always be outlets for investigative journalism. There will always be some form of news show and publication. Advertisers gain a certain value from placing their ads alongside high quality news content. Just not enough to support billions of dollars of newspaper revenue.
If the commercial radio and TV stations disappeared from the Bay Area we'd still have NPR - a high quality news alternative. Why? Because there are a certain number of people always prepared to pay something for high quality content.
Long way of saying I think you're right - we'll end up with good journalism and no newspapers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would that kill the law? All it would do is make Google news useless for German news.
My guess is that if newspaper sites lose a big chunk of their traffic they might reconsider who should be paying whom. I'm also guessing that without support from newspapers, the law is less likely to get through.
Then (in their minds) people will just go to the actual newspaper to see the headlines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
robots.txt ?
yes. They dont want to block google or other crawlers. They still want their traffic, but they also want to get paid for getting crawled and listed.
Why is this topic so complicated? A Google news snippet very rarely would suffice for a user, if they are interested they would click through, if they are not, they would not visiting the newspaper anyway. Google are not showing ads in Google News, although they might show them in search results. But still, no profit that newspaper could address is being taken by Google. In fact, Google is providing traffic. So takin…
But the key is that the first read, the morning one, involved skimming articles for their gist and reading the ones that interested me. The afternoon session possibly involved reading more, due to boredom.
The real problem the newspapers have is that most of the articles they produce fail the skim test. I don't want to read more. I get the gist. I'm not interested. If they're good I click through and read them on the original site... often then clicking to other things I find there. Win for the Google link to them. If it's a hot topic I'll often read many articles from many pubs on the same topic. But in a world with so many news sources the truth is they don't stand out, I am not going to check a thousand sources very day, or even ten. So I'm not going to wade through to find the things I'm interested in. If they don't want their headings and summaries in Google I don't care about their product.
And I'm a Google user. I pay Google's bills. I don't want them raising my rates in other areas to pay publishers for links to content that I may skim over and never want to read in depth. Why should my costs for Google - in terms of what they can deliver me for all that surplus attention of mine they harvest over a year - go up to subsidize failing newspapers producing product for which the market rate doesn't support their costs?
IANAL but trying to read the law, it seems to be a rather blatant lex google.[1] They specifically state "search engine or similar services" should be prohibited from (in an extreme interpretation) linking to newspapers, if they do not pay. ( The rest of the law is probably just redundant, since it seems to reimplement copyright for a small subset of already copyrighted material.) [1] http://dip.bundestag.de/btd/17/1…
So Google should charge. Then they can do like the phone companies with termination fees and call it a wash.
The bigger trend to this story is that information changed from something that was scarce to something that is now abundant. What the German publishers don't seem to understand is that their once so valuable and scarce goods (information and news) are becoming less and less valuable. Looks like they are trying to defend a dying business model with legislation. Herbert Simon said in the 70s: “A wealth of information c…
Media companies are in the attention harvesting business NOT in the information delivery business. The marginal value of the information product is virtually zero. The marginal value of attention redirected to ads is some rate greater than zero - some rate greater than the cost of delivering that information product. So profit can be made. But the power is in delivering the attention, not the information.
The proper term for pushing this law is "rent-seeking". You must include our content, and you must pay us for it. This is a general problem with people and businesses perceiving themselves as working for society. They cannot see the wrongs they cause - because it's all for an even better cause. German newspapers can use robots.txt and obey the social contract of the web like the rest of us.