Google News is facing pressure from Germany, France, and Brazil to start paying for linking to outside sources on its website. Publishers feel that by having their content referenced and briefly summarized with other similar sources, that fewer people are visiting their sites. No, seriously. They think that prominent exposure and easy access back to their content is having a negative impact on traffic.
Germany recently instituted the Leistungsschutzrecht, which means essentially a "performance protection right", granting German publishers one year of exclusive power to publish summaries and control distribution and requiring licenses from the likes of Google News. While it's a sensibly time-limited right and is fairly narrow in scope ("journalistic citations" and individuals posting links would be exempt), the inescapable conclusion is that this is further erosion in the balance of copyright. It's an extension of the idea of an ancillary copyright, that is, that a rightsholder should have not only the exclusive economic rights of copyright itself, but also some rights to limit commercial speech about the copyrighted work. Rightsholders have an exclusive right to control the distribution of their copyrighted works, but not to control references or citations or discussion.
In the US, the Fair Use Doctrine, though overused by many to support activities that fall outside the narrow scope of exemptions, is relatively clear on use for commentary and reporting of the news. (17 USC 107.) Quoting from a larger work is how almost all news is disseminated, and particularly online, charging for hyperlinks spells the end of massively useful free services like Google News, Instapaper, or the Huffington Post. (On the plus side, it would also curb those useless content regurgitators that blight search results.) Publishers want to change that by charging referrers for their use of snippets.
If this balkanization of the Internet is permitted to continue, it threatens to break the fundamental model upon which the web is built. Without the ability to link and refer freely, there are massive implications not only for the efficacy of web search (i.e., kiss it goodbye), but also for social media platforms and content-presentation services like Flipboard and Twitter. Although "individual Internet users" are exempt, what happens when you put thousands of individuals together? Twitter's trending topics and retweet features ultimately function as a social media version of link aggregation (and even as potential sources for journalists). Twitter certainly would not be exempt from ancillary copyright.
Would Twitter have to unleash a horde of analytics onto its site to calculate how many links and which ones demanding payment for referral? Would they have to hire a small army of accountants and finance people to handle calculating, verifying, and making those payments?
More generally, would large and established web sources use their size to negotiate favorable rates to lower costs, driving smaller and innovate startup services out of the picture and further consolidating media power? Would news aggregators limit their content to that which brings in revenue, thereby reducing content diversity?
In contrast to Betteridge's Law of Headlines, the answer to these questions is sadly 'yes'.
Flipboard offers an interesting take, working with content producers and distributors to be featured on their curated "boards"--and going out of their way even with non-partners to present both a usable, well-formatted version or preview along with a pull-up tab at the bottom where you can view the original website. While this is an excellent approach that might well survive and flourish in the grim world that ancillary copyright would bring us, it would cease to hold value if it were the only way to get content. There's something reassuring about knowing that if you feel like you've built up too much of an echo chamber, you can step outside of it and look elsewhere. That would be gone. Every news service would become a curated collection, and 90% of them would do a far worse job at it than Flipboard does.
I'm really troubled by the idea that the solution to falling revenues is to break the web and to start charging people who are trying to send eyeballs to your site. I'm sympathetic to sites that cost more to run than the advertising revenue brings in, and know that it is essentially inevitable that we'll be facing paywalls with increasing frequency. I'm also willing to accept that there's a legitimate gripe about Google and other large services are profiting from the existence of that content, because without good content, no one would go to Google News. But I can't get behind the notion that putting up roadblocks to getting people to your site in the first place solves that. Sites can already choose to be de-listed from Google News if they feel that they're not getting any net benefit from the arrangement.
Blurbs and links have to stay free. Consider it the digital equivalent of the dust jacket and just let people decide whether what's inside is worth paying for. Charging admission to the newsstand can't be the answer.
No comments:
Post a Comment