[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.