[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.