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0 pointsanticristi5y ago0 comments

Awesome summary. It seems to me that this is a bit of a failure of the fair use doctrine. Making one preview of an image or article does not impact the author's monetisation ability. Making a business out of systematically producing previews (and adding your own ads around them) should no longer quality as fair use.

We have a joke:

A: How much is a drop of gas?

B: A drop of gas? Well, zero!

A: One million drops of gas, please.

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sjy5y ago

The stated rationale for the law is not copyright infringement, so fair use is not relevant. It’s an attempt by Australia’s competition (antitrust) regulator to address an alleged market failure: “The proposed bargaining code is intended to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms in order to ensure that commercial arrangements between these parties do not undermine the ability and incentives for news media businesses to produce news for Australians.” https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20-%20Mandatory%20...

anticristiOP5y ago

I'm reading between the lines, but my understanding of the (fixed) new law is that "plain linking" would still be okay, "previewing" would require sitting at the table. What's the difference between the two?

Plain linking does not keep people on FB. Automated previewing does. Can't this be interpreted as raising the bar for fair use?

sjy5y ago

The bill says “the responsible digital platform corporation must ensure that the supply of the digital service does not, in relation to crawling, indexing, making available and distributing news businesses’ covered news content ... differentiate between registered news businesses and news businesses that are not registered news businesses ...” I don’t see any distinction between linking and previewing here. I think both involve “making the content available,” and since Facebook legally can’t “differentiate between” news content that is and isn’t covered by the mandatory bargaining code, they are choosing not to make news content available at all to Australian users.

bawolff5y ago

Fair use (or i guess fair dealing in australia) isn't totally about not negatively impacting other people's businesses. It helps your fair use argument if you don't impact, but there are plenty of clear cases where its fair use despite negative business impact. For example writing a scathing negative review of something that has quotes for context.

anticristiOP5y ago

You are right. By "business impact" I was rather thinking that the aggregator simply diverts ad revenue, without adding any value. If I made a business which summaries other books without sharing revenue, I would likely get busted.

bawolff5y ago

Why do you think that? I'm pretty sure that the cole's notes series of books do not share revenue nor do the summaries on good reads.

Straight up copying of course would be different.

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