[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.

[georgebarnett]

Agree this is where the law is now.

It’s an interesting thought experiment to wonder if we would have got here if Google News wasn’t a giant pile of summaries.