So Google gets licenses to link to new sites for free, but smaller companies and private people's website cannot link to news sites?

Note the text 'and an inalienable right to obtain an fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses'

The idea is to make it impossible to give Google a free license.

The best outcome would be if Google would refuse to link to any content of European publishers.

"The best outcome would be if Google would refuse to link to any content of European publishers."

Not so much sure that's the "best" outcome as the only possible one. As rich as Google looks, when you start dividing their income by multiple multiplicative factors it doesn't last long; the log of Google's income isn't all that large.

On the other hand, Google definitely has a lot of cash to weather what to them will be at most a partial disruption of their money making system (as this is back in the linear domain rather than the log domain), whereas the online publications that get delisted from Google will be devastated.

I would predict with some confidence that if this does pass all the way into law in the EU that it would be unlikely to last very long as law. But it can cause a lot of damage in the meantime.

There are quite a few similar rights. One example is that radio stations don't have enter agreements with individual rights owners to license songs. There is blanket fee. Similar payments are for playing music in bars, restaurants and other public spaces, for copying machines, blank CDs (and video and cassette tape), etc. All of those fees are set to collect money, not to kill of that use.

The difference this time, is that contracts with individual rights owners are specifically excluded.

So the fee is likely going to be an amount that Google can afford. But for the good of the Internet, it would be best if Google refuses and shows EU citizens that copyright has gone way beyond reasonable.

>One example is that radio stations don't have enter agreements with individual rights owners to license songs.

Isn't that because the music creator already entered an agreement with a rights organization? If the music creator didn't enter an agreement with a rights organization, the station would have to directly enter an agreement with the musician. The musician has the power to decide whether to sign with the organization or not.

The musician doesn't have much choice here. Radio stations will only perform music licensed by the rights organizations, so either they join and get some money, or they don't and get zip. Rights organizations typically invert the burden of proof. Even worse, if they do join, in many countries they are no longer allowed to license their music in another way. In Belgium for example they are expressly forbidden from releasing their own music under a creative commons license.

Another thing rights organizations are notorious for are overbroad claims. They invert the burden of proof and require all performances to prove they are not playing licensed songs, and all music publishers to prove they are not publishing licensed songs. There is a lot of bureaucracy involved with this inverted burden of proof, which has no legal basis except that rights organizations can afford big legal bills and those on the other side mostly cannot.

I find this whole rights organization business to be nothing but a legalized racket.

At least in Finland, the state-sanctioned music copyright organization has a legal authority to sell performance permissions to all of the music in the world. Maybe someone in South America wrote a song, and that person has never even heard of Finland. But if you want to perform that song in Finland, you can buy the permit from the Finnish organization.

Capitalism here. We'd just charge Google the absolute minimum amount (0.00000000001 cent per click) and outdo our competition.

Proposal here, the language is a bit cleverer than "above zero".

https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/voss11.pdf

> fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses

I thought the newest reincarnation prevents such licences (i.e. it makes it impossible to waive the right to linking fee)?

For Spain that just got local news delisted with no legal recourse.

...what stops Google from just buying a newspaper, then?

Simple really: "BigMedia" want me to pay to link to this, so here's the same topic on SmallMediaSite.

or

I wanted to link this, but "BigMedia" want me to pay, so now I'm not even mentioning their title of the topic.

> Simple really: "BigMedia" want me to pay to link to this, so here's the same topic on SmallMediaSite.

It's actually more damaging than that from the perspective of EU regulators: "I can't link to that Le Monde article, so here's a WaPo piece about the same subject".

Internet content delivery spans borders, by design. All this does is disadvantage the local producers and force their customer's eyeballs offshore.

> Internet content delivery spans borders, by design. All this does is disadvantage the local producers and force their customer's eyeballs offshore.

Coupled with GDPR and many websites around the world shutting down or closing their doors to European users, there won't be many places to go.

The overarching trend of artificial borders on the internet is terrifying.

I don't understand trying to conflate GDPR and this copyright proposal.

GDPR is a reasonably written attempt to preserve some measure of citizen privacy (i.e. you and me). It's an extension and continuation of Data Protection that's been there 20 years. Companies coped with no ill effect.

The copyright proposal is entirely for the benefit of large media companies, and the smell of lobbyists is overpowering. (i.e. not you and me)

> Coupled with GDPR and many websites around the world shutting down or closing their doors to European users,

That’s hyperbole. Most websites provenly don’t.

The GDPR is reasonable. This is not.

No need to conflate them.

Yes. Exactly.

But it's just not link, it's show a snippet (and potentially a title)

(or you can link and replace every snippet with 'censored by the EU' or something - might be a good strategy for raising awareness)

Showing the snippet makes people more likely to click through, not less. If you aren't a copyright maximalist, how is that not good for both aggregator and news site?

A better question is whether it's good for the user. Filter bubble, and all.

> Showing the snippet makes people more likely to click through, not less. If you aren't a copyright maximalist, how is that not good for both aggregator and news site?

Exactly. But publishers still think they're in the 20th century

This isn't true if you realize what sort of "snippets" they are trying to deal with. Google has been scraping content for Knowledge Graph, and offering up "the answers" so that users don't click through any links. So Google rips off other companies' content, and has basically said "if you don't like it, feel free to block Google with robots.txt and get delisted from search".

So Google has left the option that sites either give Google their content for free, and go out of business, or get delisted from search entirely, and go out of business.

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... is a pretty good example of why this is happening.

I've literally never seen one of those knowledge-graph snippets relating to current news? Google News now has stopped showing teaser texts for news for some publishers after a similar German law was passed, but "surprisingly" the majority of publishers preferred to allow Google to show teasers... (Which is why there's now talk of forbidding publishers to grant that permission for free)

And the whole law was enacted because of Google.... Let's have regulation for regulation's sake!

No

Law is not defeated.

It means that Google, due to its market power, got the clips for free. Everyone else might be asked to pay.

It's actually anticompetitive.

I totally understand the intention behind it - you see what the death of good media and rise of clickbait/shill articles did to US and UK. The other EU governments are terrified their own information landscape might go similarly downhill - and all you have left is spam, lies, propaganda and corporate ads hidden as articles.

It's just that the approach taken here is the wrong one. They are trying to fix something but shoot at the symptoms, not the cause.

It's also true that Google is exploitative in how it uses its ad + News Power (Look at the content preloader discussion) so clearly it's not aiming at the innocent. It's just not the right tool for the job. Probably because so far no one has figured out how to fix this...

Laws don't work like that. It you think any law was defeated you very mistaken about how laws and government bureaucracy works.

The law still applies and all that happened is that Google gets a free license and everyone who is not Google has to pay licensing fees.

While your point is true, the GP was talking from the perspective of Google vs the publishers. I guess "defeated" probably wasn't a wise description but I think his / her general point is still valid.

Google News is still shut in Spain: https://support.google.com/news/answer/6140047?hl=es

>>> In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated.

I don't know the detail but the way you put it seems very fair to me. Law protect publishers against Google, so they can say to Google "no", except that their interest is to say "yes". So they say "yes". Looks to me that even if the end result is the same, the publishers had a say. Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking. Now, it has to ask. Looks fair to me.

Google actually does ask, it is called robots.txt [0]. Robots.txt is the technical equivalent of asking nicely. If the publishers don't want Google using snippets of their articles or otherwise indexing their articles all publishers need to do is tell Google not to using robots.txt, no law needed [1].

This law won't hurt Google, they have the necessary lawyers and resources to deal with the ramifications. What this will hurt are the smaller search engines that don't have the same resources as Google. This law, if enacted, will end up giving more power to Google not less. For example, with the German law, Google was given a free license [2], but was DuckDuckGo given a license? As far as I can tell no. So all that changed is that Google has a license and its competitors don't. I can't see how this is a good thing for anybody but Google. It hurts consumers, reduces market choice and will end up hurting publishers.

[0] - http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html

[1] - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608

[2] - https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/22/german-publishers-...

The fundamental mechanics of the internet are such that there's no sensible justification around having to ask. It inherently makes no sense to have to ask to link to something online, especially for a news site. If they don't want someone linking to them then there are ways to avoid being linked to (requiring accounts, one-time links, requiring specific referral metadata), but by putting something on the internet you are implicitly enabling and encouraging links.

> Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking

Google News does not automatically take your content. You have to apply explicitely to get it included.

For regular search, there's always robots.txt. Claiming that there are any media/content producers who get included into the index against their will is absurd propaganda. Of course they want to be listed. They just want money, and Google has money, so they "convince" local politicians to make Google pay them their "share". Just like the Mafia.

Except you always have a say in whether or not Google takes any part of your site. Google have always respected robots.txt and it's trivial to block your site, or parts of it, from being indexed and shown in searches.

Except you won't be able to delist content without first allowing their crawler to rummage your site and returning 404 to Googlebot. Happened to me - I wanted to delist a single URL because it was generating unwanted traffic but still keep it accessible to those who have a direct link.

> Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking

No it does not, you need a lot of steps to make your website available on Google News, it does not work by default.

I agree. Even though the end result is back where they started.

Laws that don't solve actual problems are a problem.

Belgium, too (only Walloon publishers sued); I'm not sure if that was before or after Germany, but the result was the same.