Comment on Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law

• Zak@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I agree that the decline of journalistic quality is bad for the world and would like a mechanism to improve it, but I have yet to read a convincing argument for why anyone should have to pay a fee to link to a news article. I could see an argument for reducing the amount of the content that can be republished as a preview under fair use, but nobody seems to want that.

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  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Getting sick of saying that it’s not the link, it’s the preview.

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    • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There are three things I don’t like about that argument.

      1. The idea that small excerpts of copyrighted works are fair use that don’t require licensing or payment is also widely-used in journalism.
      2. At least in the case of Facebook, publishers get to decide what’s in the previews using open graph tags.
      3. News organizations have not lobbied for general changes to fair use, but special legal status for themselves and a few tech companies. Laws centered around special status rather than broad principles tend not to work out well in the long term.

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    • festus@lemmy.ca ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s not how the Canadian law was written. Google providing a link, even with no headline or preview, would still have to pay.

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• pajn@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Having to pay to even link to news articles will only accelerate the downfall of journalism though. Instead of paying, why not just link to an AI generated article instead? Much needs to be done to save good journalism but this law is a massive step in the exact opposite direction

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  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    An AI generated article would still need source material.

    Anyway, what would be the appeal of a platform that couldn’t link anything but just showed AI content?

    The way I see it, journalism is more or less dead. A shade of the former institution. There doesn’t seem many other ways to fund journalistic endeavour.

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    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      “Journalism” has be dead for a long time. Just read up on what Hearst was doing in the 1800’s.

      We’re just seeing the zombie grasping at everything it can.

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