A battle is brewing between the government and Meta after the tech giant announced it would no longer pay Australian news publishers for content that appears on its platform. This is what it could mean for your Facebook and Instagram feeds.
How often do you think people ask Google a question, either to the assistant or just in the search bar and get served the answer scraped directly into the search results, and never need to actually click into the article at all?
The thing is, you can’t copyright facts. If Google takes an article and gives you its entire contents, that’s copyright infringement and we don’t need a new special law to stop them doing it. If their article is so devoid of insight that a brief snippet and the title (which probably qualify under our Fair Dealing laws—our nearest equivalent to America’s Fair Use) are enough to deter people from clicking, it probably didn’t have much of value to begin with. And they’re even better-protected if they’re extracting key facts from the article without quoting verbatim, such as the Knowledge Graph does.
The problem with this law is that it completely ignores the fact that Google and Facebook are actually providing value to these news organisations. People very rarely choose to go to a news site directly. They search for something on Google and click the relevant link, or they find things that people and pages have posted links to on Facebook. You take away a source from Google and that company loses a huge chunk of its business. If Facebook has to pay to send people to news organisations, those organisations are double-dipping. They’re making money from their regular revenue stream (advertising or paywalls) and making money on the side by grifting Facebook. It’s a model that makes absolutely no sense if you think for one minute about what’s actually going on.
The thing is, you can’t copyright facts. If Google takes an article and gives you its entire contents, that’s copyright infringement and we don’t need a new special law to stop them doing it. If their article is so devoid of insight that a brief snippet and the title (which probably qualify under our Fair Dealing laws—our nearest equivalent to America’s Fair Use) are enough to deter people from clicking, it probably didn’t have much of value to begin with. And they’re even better-protected if they’re extracting key facts from the article without quoting verbatim, such as the Knowledge Graph does.
The problem with this law is that it completely ignores the fact that Google and Facebook are actually providing value to these news organisations. People very rarely choose to go to a news site directly. They search for something on Google and click the relevant link, or they find things that people and pages have posted links to on Facebook. You take away a source from Google and that company loses a huge chunk of its business. If Facebook has to pay to send people to news organisations, those organisations are double-dipping. They’re making money from their regular revenue stream (advertising or paywalls) and making money on the side by grifting Facebook. It’s a model that makes absolutely no sense if you think for one minute about what’s actually going on.