[nindalf]

HN is literally an aggregator - should dang and co pay websites for this privilege of linking to other websites? And lest anyone claim HN should be exempted because it’s “free”, this website is ad supported. They run job ads for YCombinator companies. There’s no shortage of revenue at YC, which they should share with publishers, according to your ideas.

Or do we recognise that freely linking to the rest of the web is how the internet become useful to the world?

[georgebarnett]

HN doesn’t provide snippet summaries of linked articles so you don’t have to click through.

[nindalf]

That’s funny, because it feels like every HN thread contains a sizeable portion of people who comment on the headline without reading the article. This is a running joke on Reddit too.

How much revenue did Reuters miss out on because people in this thread just commented without clicking through? Do dang and pg owe money to Reuters now for foregone revenue?

[abdullahkhalids]

This recent essay by Cory Doctorow talks about how owning lots of small author monopolies can be converted into a market monopoly [0], is very similar to the following argument.

The contents of the <url> tag of a page are metadata, and I think we can agree that authors don't have copyright derived monopoly over them. Anyone can share a list of titles without violating any copyright laws, and no revenue is lost because that intellectual property does not really belong to the author.

But if I start sending everyone small but different snippets of the article, as per their search term so they don't have to visit the website, I am no longer within the ambit of fair use of copyright. The intent behind the fair use clause is the same snippet is shown to everyone, so in a vast majority of cases there is no loss of revenue and we can ignore the edge cases. Here google has used the edge cases ignored by the law and turned them into a multi-billion dollar business (with at least some part of it lost by the owners of the copyright).

[0] https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

[danShumway]

> But if I start sending everyone small but different snippets of the article, as per their search term so they don't have to visit the website

That's not what this law is about. Google isn't summarizing titles, and they offered to remove snippets. The Australian government turned them down.

If the only objection here was "Google is showing different snippet summaries to lots of different people", then we wouldn't be having this debate. How has Google abused copyright here?

It feels like part of the argument here is that newspapers should be able to own facts -- that if people can look at a Google search page, see a title, and roughly know whether or not they want to click on the article, that's some kind of violation. But what does that have to do with copyright?

This is an analogy that would make Cory Doctorow sad.

[georgebarnett]

If Reuters lost a click because somebody wasn’t interested enough to follow the link, sucks to be them.

If they lost the click because the article was summarised and you didn’t need to click through to read it then that’s on HN.

This is less obvious for Google news, but substantially more obvious for other search snippets (like say looking up synonyms).

[nindalf]

That's the whole point of aggregators-with-comment-threads like HN. We read the comments for a summary + critique of the article. Often, we skip the article because the summary in the comments is better. HN is absolutely stealing traffic from Reuters in this case.

Of course a reasonable person would argue that more people clicked through to Reuters thanks to HN, and they'd be right. I was simply playing devil's advocate, using the "logic" of the Australian draft law.

[mavhc]

The real reason news publishers hate Google News is it makes clear that 99% of what they publish is just copied from someone else. They don't want you to view lots of news sites, they want you to go to their home page and read the copy they made.

[rlpb]

Ironically, the reason I often don't read the article is because of the obnoxious "consent" dialogs, Javascript apps and tracking that I have to go through in order to read the articles that HN often links. HN itself is a much more pleasant experience.

[izacus]

> HN doesn’t provide snippet summaries of linked articles so you don’t have to click through.

Australian government doesn't care about snippets - only linking to titles is still a paid action. Not to mention their idea is equivalent to "force HN to publish articles".

[yeahnah22]

Disingenuous. Google News doesn’t provide massive, moderated discussion so that you can figure out the gist of the article without opening it. (I haven’t opened this article, to take one example.)

[sullyj3]

That discussion wasn't written by the employees of the linked website, why on earth would they be entitled to charge for it? It's like saying record companies ought to get royalties from people who write reviews of their music. The work, while related, is very clearly not the intellectual property of those whose work it's about. Very strange to suggest otherwise. The google case is very different, they're directly using excerpts.

Honestly don't understand why google doesn't just say "fine, we'll stop providing excerpts and only provide the link, enjoy the reduced traffic, you really scored an own goal on this one, dumbasses."

[UncleMeat]

> Honestly don't understand why google doesn't just say "fine, we'll stop providing excerpts and only provide the link, enjoy the reduced traffic, you really scored an own goal on this one, dumbasses."

Because it is literally against this law. Google has done this in other cases and it is a fine compromise. But this law requires Google/Facebook to continue to link to news outlets. And simply no longer showing snippets does not address the "problem" claimed here and would not prevent the charges.

[nindalf]

Google can’t do that. The law specifically prohibits them from stopping the display of links to Australian news websites if they’re still indexing other news websites. They must show these links and must pay for the privilege of doing so.

[sullyj3]

I'm not advocating they stop showing the links. I'm advocating they show the links without the content excerpts - the use of which, to my understanding, is the justification for being asked to pay. Since the excerpts are the websites' intellectual property, whereas the links themselves are just links. Surely you couldn't have to pay to link to a website, that would be preposterous. Maybe I'm mistaken though.

They could even have a nice big passive aggressive message "Excerpt redacted due to the XYZ act of 2021. Click here to learn more about how Australian legislation is fucking stupid"

[nindalf]

You are mistaken.

From the code

> Why is this code necessary?

> The code seeks to address the fundamental bargaining power imbalance between Australian news media businesses and major digital platforms. This imbalance has resulted in news media businesses accepting less favourable terms for the inclusion of news on digital platform services than they would otherwise agree to.

"inclusion of news on digital platform services" - the mere inclusion, nothing about the presentation.

[rstuart4133]

But this isn't about copyright, or those snippets. In fact the hypocrisy stinks.

Newspapers are news scavenging machines. They regularly copy entire stories from each other, with journalist changing just a few words to get around copyright issues. Surely you've noticed? Every newspaper covers the mostly same stories, with the same facts.

The reason it didn't matter is this isn't about copyright, linking, fairness or any other the other smoke stories you hear. The newspapers had a wonderful business model: they sold ads on dead trees. To entice people to buy their ads laden dead trees, they added news as bait. It's common knowledge in the newspaper the amount of "copy" you have to carry is determined purely by the number of ads you sold - you had to dilute the ad / news ration down to a palatable level.

The people they could sell these ads on dead trees to was limited to roughly how far you could transport those dead trees after they came off the press (at midnight or so) so people could read them over breakfast. Maybe 100km at best? If someone started moving on that territory it was open warfare, but if they just copied your stories so they could sell ads to people outside of you territory - who cared? Rampant copying is how they collectively kept costs down.

Now the internet has moved in, and nobody looks at ads printed on dead trees any more. The newspapers business model has gone. That would be true whether Google was the 1000 pound gorilla on the internet or there was no Google like company. Moving the 100's (1000's?) of mastheads that thrived because of the 100km dead tree transport limit was always going to result in a blood bath that would leave just a couple standing. We are nowhere near that yet.

In the end this is about the internet taking their ad revenue. And that's not because of Google - it's because where before it was read the newspaper on the train or nothing, now you've got a while internet to browse, and most people don't choose to look at news sites, so they lost their audience. In particular it's got nothing whatsoever to do with copyright, linking or fairness, which is why apparently the legislation says Google has to hand over their ad revenue to the newspapers whether they link to them or not.