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Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

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Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#421
post #363

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That price point seems high. For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.

It is high because most people don't want to pay for a share of news. They'd rather watch TV, and not even the best TV. If you want the best, you need to pay for Max and Disney and Apple and Amazon and the rest.

And if you want the best news you have to pay for more than WaPo.

Besides, if you actually like to read why would you be buying washington post? People who like to read usually aren't going into 5 minute long shallow articles, they are getting a book on the topic.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That price point seems high. For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.

That’s the plan with ads. If you don’t want to sit through annoying ads, it’s $180/year. Either way, producing quality journalism costs money. And I’m ok paying a reasonable fee for it. :shrug:

Yes, but creating tv/movie is much much more expensive.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#423
post #252

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>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

> news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wal…

>to appease google

the only reason they have to appease google is because they had given up on worrying about navigation or discovery on their own platforms, and ceded that to google. which is dumb. google's not forcing them to do anything, they gave up control and responsibility to google.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#424

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and they should pay for scraping. but that's not what this is about, this is about charging for linking to news articles.

> but that's not what this is about, this is about charging for linking to news articles. Sure, but these things are directly related. It's the scraping that generates the links in question and ultimately earns Google ad revenue. And, if they did pay on the scraping side, then charging for linking would be less relevant. As it is, they're collecting the content, but not paying on either end. So, it seems if you agree…

"scraping" usually refers to unauthorized access for the purposes of using that content for something else. what google does to generate search result pages is usually called "indexing", and websites go out of their way to encourage google to do more of it.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can mana…

> How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.

nobody other than the publishers is trying to say the money should be based on view counts. tying anything to view counts is obviously a dumb idea.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#426
post #361

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Copyright is the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government, this law has nothing to do with copyright law.

That's an extremely narrow view. Federal copyright law is Federal jurisdiction. States have the power to make their own non-conflicting copyright laws.

No they don't. Show me copyright law from ONE US state!

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#428

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When I attended college and got a degree in Mechanical Engineering, that didn’t make all my future design output a derivative work (legally). I don’t earn money from AI/LLM, but I tend to think that there’s a point past which the derivative nature of a type of summarization is not obviously a derivative of that entire corpus of work. (At least not in a sense that’s meaningful/practical.)

Certainly not all of it, but if you were to cut and paste some words from one of your textbooks, maybe change a few words, and then pass it off as your own, I would call you a plagiarist or a thief. The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you…

Credible argument? You call baiting and entrapment credible? Those articles don't pop up on their own from chatGPT, it takes effort. You need to know the first phrase and the title to prime it. And then it only works once in a while, not every time. They even complained in the lawsuit that the cases where the model doesn't regurgitate it hallucinates articles as from them and they don't like that either.

NYT itself is full of fluff and derivative news, and suing for expired news that only have historical value now. It's just flexing their power to corner AI.

We can't copyright everything. Some things are free: letters, words, sometimes common phrases, also, ideas. An AI is entitled to learn everything at the level of ideas, even from copyrighted works. They just need to paraphrase or rewrite as Q&A the copyrighted material before training to avoid identical replication.

Copyright is already too big as it is, don't allow them to make ideas protected as well, it will have a chilling effect on us too, not just AI models.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#429

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[flagged]

A senior editor just admitted they are biased. You can try and guess my politics (you'd be wrong), but I can guess that you don't think journalists who agree with your politics can be biased. I can agree with NPR's politics and still admit they are biased, why can't you? https://www.allsides.com/news-source/npr-fact-check-media-bi...

One person has made some claims.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not all of it, but if you were to cut and paste some words from one of your textbooks, maybe change a few words, and then pass it off as your own, I would call you a plagiarist or a thief. The NYT makes a credible argument that the AIs are just cutting and pasting from their training set, sometimes lining up words or phrases from different sources. There's a bit of synthesis going on, but not as much as you…

Credible argument? You call baiting and entrapment credible? Those articles don't pop up on their own from chatGPT, it takes effort. You need to know the first phrase and the title to prime it. And then it only works once in a while, not every time. They even complained in the lawsuit that the cases where the model doesn't regurgitate it hallucinates articles as from them and they don't like that either. NYT itself i…

Baiting and entrapment? Please. They used the API the way it was designed. The next thing, you'll be arguing that hot women in nice dresses are somehow "entrapping" their rapists.

If anything, their examples illustrate the kind of knowledge that can only be found in the NYT's original reporting. They focused on some events that only their newspaper covered well and the AI responded by plagiarizing the NYT's coverage, something that's part of its inherent design.

And I'm not talking about copyrighting everything. Nor is the NYT. Consider the opposite case where they have no way to force readers to pay them for their hard work. Is that the kind of world you want to live within?

I'm very happy to reward the artists and writers who make creations. I don't see anything wrong with giving them what anti-copyright people call a "monopoly." Why? Because I know that it pushes other people to create their own new knowledge for society and not skate through by simply plagiarizing.

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