EU approves internet copyright law, including ‘link tax’ and ‘upload filter’

"Publishers" (newspapers) are 99% simply reprinting news they get from "the wire" (Reuters for example, or Bloomberg, or ...), or a few wire services. One way to look at Facebook and Google News is that they are better versions of these wires, available for end users of the content instead of just paying subscribers (Reuters' wire is a subscription service)

The way it works is this: let's say I feel the need to put out a press release. I have an employee write the news (heavily favoring me) and "put out the press release", meaning I submit the article to a news agency [1], including image and text online, paying 35$ for the privilege of having it appear on the feeds newspapers use to put out news. This is why even the BBC is full of "researchers working for IBM have saved the world again".

There are a number of issues. Of course 99% of the news is not exactly neutral or even a little bit researched, because it's just press releases. 1% is, but is produced by reporters working for the news agencies (only huge places like BBC still have their own reporters). And Google is a lot better than even the BBC (which is very high quality) at finding and presenting press releases to the public. Hell, it's actually better at deciding the trustworthiness of them than news desks (mostly because they, for profit reasons, refuse to give humans even half an hour to check things). Furthermore, those algorithms run so cheaply that they actually provide a personalized version of the news of the day based on both your interests and the news. I assume Jeff Bezos has the same service by a newspapers, but I imagine few others do.

So the underlying issue newspapers are having is "Google automated and Facebook crowdsources what we do, and their automated algorithms are much more successful than our humans, please outlaw them".

> To be fair, google and the like have been living off scraping third-party content and making it available in a way that only the scrapers see any traffic from that content, thus earn anything that is there to be earned.

Yeah there is no value at all in having a searchable index, content summaries, and it's unfair that people get paid for that. Furthermore newspapers just use humans to do what Google news does with algorithms. Never mind that that's what people want.

And as pointed out, people see more value in the aggregated, summarized and algorithmically curated versions of the same data.

Did you ever use the phonebook ? Did it have ads or not ? Should we outlaw the phonebook too ? Did you ever use an encyclopedia or a dictionary ? Did you pay for it ?

I feel like your argument has some shortcomings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency

...and in this case it's the intellectual property of content providers who use it to run their business.

>And it's not clear to me that intellectual property (or other intangible personal property not representing control of tangible goods), strictly speaking, can be a “means of production” in the sense Communists are concerned about.

Even if we ignore how this law was created to help private media companies that are vilified for controlling the press, I'm sure that we can agree that media companies do depend on the existence of strong intellectual properly rights to run their business. That's pretty much thr central argument: if they can't enforce their rights over their private property them it ceases to serve its purpose as a means of production.

Oh its a lie alright, and it belongs to you.

Only in the leftist bizzaro world does love of country = hatred of immigrants. It's pathetic that this is what we are dealing with these days.