You've got Google, who are now pretty much running the world high street as the quintessential evil rentier, providing little value while extracting virtually all the profits.
They are constantly moving the goal posts, which can ruin businesses overnight, with no oversight.
Now they have to tell businesses beforehand before they make them bankrupt, so the business at least has a chance to change.
Does that sound less dumb and more reasonable if written that way?
> providing little value while extracting virtually all the profits
This is a wildly inaccurate statement. Users have every opportunity to visit the news sites directly and yet they choose not to. So clearly search and social media sites are providing value.
> They are constantly moving the goal posts, which can ruin businesses overnight
We're only talking about news businesses for the purposes of this law. If a news outlet is entirely dependent on google search traffic for their revenue then they don't have a stable business to begin with.
This whole law makes the assumption that Google and Facebook are the reason new outlets are losing revenue, but I have yet to see any evidence of that.
Hence google simply steal the most valuable bit, the headline and the summary, and users can get away with merely browsing the free content, which Google has stolen.
It's as if google owns a newspaper store, that they allow any person to just browse for free. In a real world newsagents you'd be told to buy or GTFO because the newsagent makes money from selling the papers. But because google already made their money, they sell the land, they gleefully give it away for free.
Don't forget, Google is worthless without the content, if everyone banned Google from scraping content tomorrow it would go bust overnight.
But almost every site would make more money without search engines.
Reflecting on this, it's actually in every governments interest to make it as hard as possible for Google/Facebook/etc. to do business in their territory. If google just "give up" on Australia, it means all that advertising money will probably go to an Australian search engine, and be taxable.
People are rightfully pointing out that nobody forces you to put any of that on Google.
But I also want to point out that if the headline and snippet summary are the most valuable part of an article you write, then you're not providing much value. Copyright law was never intended to protect summaries of what your work is about.
At a basic level, facts are not copyrightable. To argue that saying the title of a news article is "stealing" is like arguing that multiple papers shouldn't be able to cover the same topics. It's like arguing that I shouldn't be able to tell my friend about current events because a newspaper broke the story first. If people can look at multiple sources/titles and get a summary without clicking then tough luck, the thing they are intuiting is not the thing that was copyrighted. News orgs never owned copyright over the individual factual parts of their stories.
If people genuinely believe that IP laws should cover facts about the world, that a reporter should have the exclusive right to talk about an event just because they arrived on the scene first -- I just can't take that argument seriously. If that's what people think, then our social education efforts about copyright have just gone off the rails.
The news is not copyrightable. Your writeup of the news, the specific language that you use, is. Trying to change that would be a disaster for everyone, it would be declaring a war on information itself just so that some entrenched news orgs can make a quick buck.
Google is hardly "stealing" this. The news sites are offering it directly to Google, and asking for them to make use of it. They could ask Google not to index them, or they could stop asking to appear the carousel, at any point.
Google actually prepared to stop listing news sites to Australians at all, in preparation for this law, and so the law was changed to force them to continue listing the sites.
If Google is stealing the content, they are also being required to steal the content. They're not allowed to opt out of showing the data that the news sites are offering. They're not allowed to decline showing news at all.
You're making the same point I am, but drawing the opposite conclusion. If what these news sites are producing is so valuable and google is stealing it, why do they not just ban google from scraping their site?
The answer is that they were making money when they were the only way news got out into the world. Now that anyone can break news the news itself is not valuable. Google and Facebook aren't hurting these publications, the existence of the internet is.
I've never tried this at a newsagent, but on multiple visits to bookstores I've just read different books without a transaction.
Newsagents do have the power to tell google to GTFO by editing their robots.txt though
"But that's how I get to the website, I type it into the Google!"
This weird, "we hate Google, so we're going to pass this massive indirect law that reinterprets fair use, but only applies to them" is pointless and counterproductive. If you don't believe that Google is providing any value, then ban search engines and see how the people of Australia react. But I don't actually believe that the problem people have here is that they think users are forced to look up websites through Google.
If that was the problem, then people on both sides would be encouraging Google to pull out of Australia. It's nonsensical to say that indexing websites isn't a valuable service.
But websites are free to compete with that, by offering better ways to access the content, such as emails tailored to your interests. I know CNN had that option back in the day.
They can't be providing little value, because the law here demands that Google link to news articles. If there was no value in the search traffic then news media companies would be fine with "okay, we will simply drop google news and stop linking to news media" but they aren't okay with that.
