snippets – Techdirt (original) (raw)

That Time Google Kinda, But Not Really, Accused People Searching For Techdirt Of Searching For CSAM

from the you're-searching-for-what-now? dept

Earlier this week I posted two examples of people falsely being told that a post or a search was deemed connected to child sexual abuse material. Earlier this week, I thought I had spotted another example, when someone on Bluesky alerted me that they had searched for “techdirt” and the results included a line saying “We think that your search might be associated with child sexual abuse. Child sexual abuse or viewing sexual imagery of children can lead to imprisonment and….”

I tried the search myself, but didn’t see the same results… until I VPN’d my way into a Polish server, and did:

On Bluesky, others quickly chimed in, noting that they also saw it elsewhere in the EU, though not always. It seemed to depend on a few factors, including whether or not you were logged in.

The whole thing seemed pretty strange, and we started to investigate what was going on. At one point, a colleague noted it was weird that the warning would appear where it seems to be in those images. That space is normally for summaries of the page you’re looking at. If there was an alert or a warning, it seems like it would appear above the search entirely.

And then… I realized. That line was not a warning from Google. It was Google doing a terrible job of summarizing what’s on Techdirt. Because, remember how I started this story off talking about the article I posted on Tuesday about mistaken claims of searching for CSAM? In the middle of that post, I included the text of that warning… which was identical to the text in the “warning” on Google.

In other words, for who knows what reason, when Google tried to summarize Techdirt, it just pulled that quote out of one article on the page, and for some category of searches that’s what it showed as the summary of the whole page. I do not know why it would choose that one sentence, because what a perplexing sentence to choose! And one that might cause people to not click on Techdirt!

There has been lots of talk about how Google’s search quality has been on the decline, and this seems like another example of the kinds of reasons why. Still, it a weird way, it’s yet another example of why policing stuff online can be so tricky. An AI summarizer might grab the wrong sentence, and when placed in the wrong context, it could look very, very bad.

I’m not entirely sure that there’s anything that can be done in such situations. It’s not like we live in Australia, where internet laws are upside down. It’s just one of those weird things, where maybe the answer is just… to use other search engines, rather than relying on an increasingly unreliable Google.

Filed Under: search, snippets, summaries
Companies: google, techdirt

French Publishers Accuse Musk Of Ditching Snippets To Skirt Ridiculous French Copyright/Neighboring Rights Law

from the fight-it-you-coward dept

So, yesterday we had the story of how, at Elon’s personal request, exTwitter is moving to get rid of link and snippet text in what had been known as Twitter Cards for news organizations. Musk claims that it’s for “esthetic” reasons, though in our article, we noted the uncanny timing of this decision coming just a few weeks after the French news agency AFP had sued exTwitter in France, claiming that the snippets violate France’s neighboring rights law.

As we discussed both the law and this lawsuit are incredibly stupid. Even if we accept that France has this law, the lawsuit still makes no sense. If AFP doesn’t want snippets to appear on exTwitter IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE SET UP TWITTER CARDS for its site. But it did. So, AFP is suing exTwitter for something that AFP itself setup. It’s incredibly stupid.

So stupid that one would hope that Elon Musk and his “hardcore street fighter litigation” team would fight it. When Musk announced this “hardcore” litigation team, he made some promises that he has regularly failed to keep, including that his litigation team “will never surrender/settle an unjust case against us, even if we will probably lose.”

So, look, the AFP lawsuit is completely unjust. Even if ignoring how stupid France’s neighboring rights law is, AFP shouldn’t get away for suing exTwitter for actions that AFP themselves setup by enabling the Twitter cards.

But, French media publishers are already claiming that this new move to get rid of snippets altogether is the company trying to get out of complying with the law:

Musk’s decision to scrap headlines and texts is “not surprising,” Emmanuel Parody, secretary-general of content providers lobby GESTE, told POLITICO. By doing so, the online platform effectively “removes the last things” that would have ensured it’s covered by the copyright rules.

But… that makes no sense. First off, even with the coincidental timing of the AFP lawsuit and then the removal of snippets, I’m still not convinced Musk would completely ditch all snippets globally, just because of a stupid French law (other countries implementing similar neighboring rights laws are generally basing it on the links themselves, rather than the snippets).

And, if Musk was doing it to avoid the French snippet tax, he should straight up say that, because (like Meta and Google are doing in Canada) it helps let the public know what stupid corrupt laws politicians are passing to create a system to funnel money from successful internet companies to lazy, failed, media publishers.

Also, if it is for that reason, then it goes against Musk’s promise to use his lawyers such that they would “never surrender… an unjust case” because this is the ultimate surrender. Fight the case. Highlight how stupid these neighboring rights laws are in general. But, even better, highlight how particularly stupid the AFP case is because the only reason AFP snippets show on Twitter is because AFP set them up to show.

Filed Under: copyright, elon musk, france, neighboring rights, snippet tax, snippets, twitter cards
Companies: afp, twitter, x

Today In ‘Here’s How Elon Is Making ExTwitter Worse,’ He’s Going To Get Rid Of Headlines & Snippets For News

from the just-stop-it,-i-have-other-work-to-do dept

Look, I know some folks get annoyed that I write as much about Elon Musk and exTwitter as I do, but he’s really been the most fascinating case study in sheer wrongness regarding the running of a modern internet company and it’s just endlessly fascinating. And, really, if he just stopped doing stupid things, I could get to the very long list of other stuff I’d like to write about, but day after day after day, he just comes out with something new and stupid.

It’s uncanny.

Anyway, the latest, as first reported by Kylie Robison at Fortune, is that Elon wants to remove headlines and snippets from news articles posted to exTwitter. When an Elon stan tweeted about Robison’s article, Musk confirmed it and said it was coming from him “directly” and it will be done to “greatly improve esthetics.” From Robison’s article:

The change means that anyone sharing a link on X—from individual users to publishers—would need to manually add their own text alongside the links they share on the service; otherwise the tweet will display only an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL. While clicking on the image will still lead to the full article on the publisher’s website, the change could have major implications for publishers who rely on social media to drive traffic to their sites as well as for advertisers.

According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the change is being pushed directly by X owner Elon Musk. The primary objective appears to be to reduce the height of tweets, thus allowing more posts to fit within the portion of the timeline that appears on screen. Musk also believes the change will help curb clickbait, the source said.

“It’s something Elon wants. They were running it by advertisers, who didn’t like it, but it’s happening,” the source said, adding that Musk thinks articles occupy excessive space on the timeline.

On exTwitter people were passing around images of the change, going from the first screenshot on the left (how this currently works) to the example on the right, showing a giant image that will link to the article entirely without context.

How are people even going to know to click on those images when they just look like regular images? This is truly ridiculous.

Musk also claimed that journalists should publish directly on exTwitter rather than elsewhere, suggesting he thinks he can take on platforms like Substack:

Of course, a few years back, Twitter bought a Substack competitor called Revue, but Elon shut that down because nothing good from the old company can survive. Elon has to reinvent it in the dumbest way possible.

On top of that, Musk has obviously had his battles with media organizations. We covered his stupid battle with NPR that caused the organization to leave Twitter, even once Musk rescinded his petty changes to NPR’s account. And, of course, just recently there were the reports of how he was slowing down access to certain news sites. So perhaps this is just another attack on the media.

That said, there’s one other possibility that I haven’t seen anyone discuss. Just a few weeks ago, AFP sued exTwitter for failing to pay them under France’s extremely dumb snippet tax law. This is a French law that is similar in many ways to Australia’s and Canada’s link tax, except it’s more explicitly about snippets rather than links.

Of course, as we pointed out at the time, exTwitter should win that lawsuit, as the only way that snippets show up on Twitter is if the media org set up their Twitter Cards to work that way. The Twitter cards feature is how news sites would tell Twitter what to show when links are included, but this new change sounds like Musk will be massively limiting what data can be included through those cards.

So, it seems entirely possible that once Elon learned France was trying to make him pay for the snippets that show up via Twitter Cards, he just told the team to get rid of the snippets to get out of paying.

Of course, the reality is that this just (yet again) makes the product way worse, especially for news, which is a major reason that people use the platform. As with the ‘remove block’ idea, pretty much everyone seems to be telling Elon this is a dumb idea, but those seem to be the decisions he revels in the most.

Filed Under: elon musk, links, news, snippet tax, snippets, twitter cards
Companies: twitter, x

Upload Filters Will Always Be A Bad Idea, But Germany's New Implementation Of Article 17 Is An Attempt To Provide Some Protection For Users, Which Others May Follow

from the but-what-will-the-CJEU-say? dept

The EU’s Copyright Directive was passed back in 2019, and the two-year period for implementing the law in national legislation is almost up. The text’s contradictory requirements to stop infringing material from being posted online without imposing a general requirement to monitor users, which is not permitted under EU law, has proved difficult for governments to deal with. France aims to solve this by ignoring even the limited user protections laid down by the Directive. Germany has been having a rather fraught debate about how exactly Article 17, which implicitly requires upload filters, should be implemented. One good idea to allow users to “pre-flag” as legal the material they upload was jettisoned. That led to fears that the country’s implementation of Article 17 would be as bad as France’s. But the final version of the law does attempt to ensure that automated filters — now admitted as indispensable, despite earlier assurances they were optional — do not block user uploads that are not infringing on copyright. Communia explains:

the German implementation relies on the concept of “uses presumably authorised by law”, which must not be blocked automatically. For an upload to qualify as “presumably authorised by law”, it needs to fulfil the following cumulative criteria:

The use must consist of less than 50% of the original protected work, The use must combine the parts of the work with other content, and The use must be minor (a non-commercial use of less than 15 seconds of audio or video, 160 characters of text or 125 kB of graphics) or, if it generates significant revenues or exceeds these thresholds, the user must flag it as being covered by an exception.

Although it’s good that this “presumably authorised by law” use is enshrined in law, the actual limits are absurd. For example, the name alone of the EU Copyright Directive in German is longer than 160 characters. Copyright holders can still challenge the legality of material, but platforms have to keep the uploads online until the complaints have been reviewed by a human. As former Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda writes on the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (Society for Civil Liberties) site, there’s another feature of the new German law that might help keep upload filters in check, at least a little (original in German, translation via DeepL):

In order to enforce freedom of expression and artistic freedom against upload filters gone wild, the draft law provides for a right of association action for non-commercial associations dedicated to protecting the interests of users. These associations can take legal action against platforms that repeatedly block legal content. In addition, users will be able to claim damages against false copyright claims. The Society for Civil Liberties will use these possibilities if it becomes necessary.

Those are important new options for getting material back online, and discouraging over-blocking. Reda notes that there is also good news for popular online activities such as caricature, parody and pastiche, which will be permitted without restrictions:

This copyright exception includes memes, remixes, mashups, fan fiction and fan art. The German government’s draft proposal was to restrict this right to remix in the German copyright reform, although it was adopted as mandatory at the EU level as part of Article 17. The German government’s proposal that these uses should only be allowed “provided that the extent of the use is justified by the specific purpose” generated an outcry in the fan fiction community. This has apparently had an effect, because the [German parliament’s] legal committee has removed this restriction. Fans in Germany can now look forward to a solid legal basis for fan art and remix culture.

The new German copyright law also brings in copyright exceptions for online teaching, and text and data mining. Cultural institutions such as libraries or archives will be permitted to make their collections available online if these works are no longer commercially available. Those are all welcome, but it is the implementation of Article 17 that is likely to have the most impact. As the Communia blog post notes:

the German implementation law sets a new standard for the implementation of the [Digital Single Market] directive. This is especially true for the implementation of Article 17. With the Commission having missed the chance to issue guidance for the member states in a timely manner [discussed previously on Techdirt], other member states who seek to implement Article 17 in a fundamental rights-compliant way should look at the German law for guidance.

Since the new Germany copyright law could become the model for other EU nations as they implement Article 17 — except for France, of course — it’s good news that it has a number of positive elements. Those are likely to prove crucial if — or rather when — the EU Copyright Directive faces another legal challenge at the CJEU, the Court of Justice of the European Union (Poland has already lodged one). The complaint is likely to be that Article 17 cannot be implemented without violating the fundamental rights of users. In that case, the CJEU will have to decide whether Germany’s innovative approach goes far enough in preserving them.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: article 17, censorship, copyright, eu, eu copyright directive, fair dealing, fair use, germany, presumably authorized by law, snippets, upload filters

Canadian Publishing Group Says France Has The Right Idea, Presses For Its Own Google Tax

from the dividing-by-almost-zero dept

Canada is more than just a calmer, more apologetic version of the United States. It’s its own thing. But, more accurately, it’s a Britain + France thing. While Canada shares a common border with us, it’s still more Europe than US of A.

Every so often we’re reminded of its ties with the other side of the pond. This is one of those times.

French regulators recently decided Google owed French news sites for all the traffic it sends to them. It mandated “negotiations” between Google and French newspapers, but insisted the negotiations begin with Google getting out its wallet.

It appears Canadian lobbyists agree with France: Google owes them money.

A Canadian news industry advocacy group says that Canada would do well to follow France’s example in forcing internet search giant Google Inc. to pay news publishers for their content.

I guess this depends on how you define “do well.” This could backfire severely, resulting in no new revenue streams and fewer site visitors. Just ask Spain. That’s not “doing well.” If this means the group thinks it’s advisable to follow France’s example, it’s also wrong. But that’s the direction journalists are being steered by their advocates.

News Media Canada chief executive John Hinds said Thursday that the federal government will need to take a leadership role if the power dynamic between Google and publishers is to be changed.

This isn’t the first time Canadian journalists have demanded tech companies pay them for the traffic they send them. Three years ago, a Google tax was pitched to the Canadian government — one that included Facebook and Netflix in a proposal to tax companies who helped bring Canadian content to site users around the world.

Things are tough all over, thanks to a radical shift in, well… everything… since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Hinds somehow believes an advertising giant will provide for everyone during a time when everyone’s advertising revenues are down.

Hinds said the collapse of advertising rates in the face of the COVID-10 global pandemic, at a time when people are reading news sites at higher rates than ever, highlights the problem.

“I think it’s a fundamental thing: We need to be paid for our content. We need to be compensated,” Hinds said.

Fair enough. Let your readers do that. If they’re not interested, it’s really not up to a bunch of other companies located elsewhere in the world to make up the perceived difference. Everything sucks everywhere at the moment. Wringing a few bucks out of Google isn’t going to reverse anyone’s fortunes. And the more newspapers that convince governments Google should pay for sending them traffic, the less they’ll all be making individually.

A Google tax isn’t a revenue stream. It’s not even a trickle. Here’s Nate Hoffelder’s estimate of how Google’s “billions” in profit would actually pay out for rent-seeking newspapers:

Google is making under 4 cents per search, and turning a profit of around a half a cent per search.

Of course, that is an average across all of Google’s search results, and it includes search terms and even whole verticals which are not monetized (Google News, for example). And that is also a global average and not based on EU revenues, so it is not 100% applicable. (And those calculations are based on a bunch of unsupported assumptions.)

Leaving those caveats aside, the point that matters is that news publishers want Google to pay for the use of their links and snippets. This means that Google would need to take that 3.7 cents and divide it between all of the relevant links returned with each click of the search button (after taking a cut for itself).]

Efforts like this are counterproductive. They’re unlikely to reverse the fortunes of failing news concerns and far more likely to convince US tech companies to avoid providing specific services for certain countries. If Canadian publishers want what France has, they’re only going to end up splitting the disappointment.

Filed Under: aggregators, canada, france, google news, google tax, john hinds, news aggregators, news publishers, snippets, traffic
Companies: news media canada

Struggling Canadian News Agencies Ask Government For A 'Google Tax'

from the loads-gun,-points-at-foot dept

It never fails (although the proposed solution often does): when faced with the struggles of operating news organizations in the internet era, far too many industry leaders suggest someone else should pay for their failing business models.

The favorite target is Google. Google has somehow destroyed the profitability of news media companies by creating an incredibly successful search engine. Even though its search engine directs users to news agencies’ websites, there are those in the industry that believe incoming traffic isn’t enough to offset their perception that the search engine somehow piggybacks off their success, rather than the other way around.

So-called “Google taxes” have been passed into law in countries around the world. In every case, they’ve been a disaster. In Spain, new agencies begged to have the law rolled back after losing traffic from Google searches. Having seen what didn’t work in Spain, Austrian lawmakers floated the same idea, proposing a tax on SINGLE WORDS in search results. The latest bad idea is an EU-wide “snippet tax,” because it worked so well in Spain, Spanish newspapers begged the EU to step in and block Google from killing its news article search results in Spain in response to the proposed tax.

With all of this data to go on, you’d think the idea would be dead. But it isn’t. The EU wants to spread its stupidity across several countries. Meanwhile in Canada, a meeting of minds over the fate of Canadian media companies has culminated in the same exact aneurysm.

Tax changes, better copyright protection and fees imposed on Facebook and Google are among the solutions being touted to help rescue Canada’s ailing news industry, internal reports show.

Those suggestions were prominent in closed-door sessions with news leaders conducted by the Public Policy Forum, a think-tank the federal government has hired to suggest policies in support of Canadian journalism during a period of digital disruption and reporter layoffs.

So, there’s also a “Facebook tax” proposal, one that originates from the country’s ongoing efforts to support local creations and content. Those pushing a form of Google tax are suggesting this would be no different than the government’s levying of fees on cable companies whose programming didn’t contain enough Canadian-made content.

“Perhaps this could be [a] concept … applied in the digital space, establishing charges on news aggregators and foreign content producers such as Facebook, Google, Netflix and National Newswatch to subsidize made-in-Canada content.”

Perhaps. It’s definitely a “concept” and one that could be “applied” to digital space… but only if the Canadian government wishes to see foreign content producers pull out of the Canadian market. (And, as the CBC notes, the think tank quoted doesn’t appear to know that National Newswatch is actually a Canadian media company. That kind of “thinking” is going to get in the way of itself if these are the minds crafting new media policies.)

And there’s really no explanation for this:

“Canadian policy-makers should consider whether copyright laws that govern file-sharing in the music industry could be applied in the news industry,” with some arguing for a 24-hour period of exclusivity.

Exclusivity is impossible to guarantee on the internet, so unless the legislature is willing to criminalize this form of… I don’t know, infringement(?), then there’s little that can be done to guarantee 24 hours of exclusivity to any media company. Not only that, but the web is world-wide, and Canadians are free to bring their eyeballs and clicks to foreign sites not subject to any ridiculous 24-hour exclusivity “rights.”

As for the file-sharing, I don’t even know where to start. Are newspapers going to sue readers for sharing paywalled content or posting links to Facebook? Is unauthorized consumption of news the new piracy?

Better suggestions are made elsewhere in the report, although these still rely on taxing others to prop up struggling industries.

Change tax rules to allow philanthropic support of journalism by charitable or non-profit foundations. “Under existing rules, it becomes difficult to establish the type of independent, non-profit news model that has proven so successful in the United States through ProPublica,” says the interim report.

Create tax incentives and exemptions to encourage coverage of local news. Investors, for example, could get special tax credits for putting money into local, non-profit digital news startups.

Review the role of the government-financed CBC, which has moved into digital news space and — according to some publishers — has undermined the private sector’s abilities to attract ad dollars. (The CBC has since proposed that it abandon all advertising, relying solely on increased public funding.)

In every case, there’s a look to Canadian citizens’ pocketbooks to subsidize media entities that, for whatever reason, Canadians haven’t felt like supporting directly.

This is still in its discussion phase, but the summary report points to a lot of bad ideas bubbling to the top. If Canada wants to turn news media into government-subsidized industries, it’s going to do at least as much damage to the quality of reporting as their current financial struggles. Any perception of indebtedness to the government will work against these agencies, undermining their reporting and creating doubts of impartiality in the minds of their readers.

As for the various taxes of US companies to subsidize falling Canadian newspapers sales, hopefully a longer look at the proposals will reveal the unintended negative consequences of these plans before both Canadians and Canadian media companies pay the belated price for their short-term thinking.

Filed Under: business models, canada, google tax, news, snippets

German Publishers Still Upset That Google Sends Them Traffic Without Paying Them Too; File Lawsuit

from the your-honor,-how-dare-they-send-us-traffic dept

Oh boy. Remember VG Media? That’s the consortium of German news publishers who were so damn angry that Google News sends them all sorts of traffic without also paying them. A year and a half ago, they demanded money from Google. That failed, so they went crying to German regulators who laughed off the request. After there were some concerns that a new “ancillary copyright” right regime in Germany might require payment for posting such snippets, Google properly responded by removing the snippets for those publishers, who totally freaked out and called it blackmail.

Let me repeat that for you, in case you missed it: the publishers insisted that Google’s News search was somehow illegal and taking money away from them, and thus they demanded money from Google. When Google responded, instead, by removing the snippets providing summaries to their stories, the publishers claimed it was unfair and blackmail. In short, not only do these German publishers want Google to pay them to send them traffic, they want such payments and traffic to be mandatory.

However, with Google removing the snippets, VG Media granted a “free” license to Google just to get the snippets back into Google News — even though Google didn’t need such a license. Meanwhile, they complained to German competition authorities about this supposed “blackmail” and like the earlier regulators, the German competition authorities told VG Media to go pound sand.

If you thought the situation was over, you underestimated the short-sightedness of VG Media and the German publishers. They’ve now apparently filed a lawsuit against Google over all this, taking the issue into court. Again: this is all because Google is sending their websites traffic… for free.

Meanwhile, these geniuses at the German publishers might want to actually play out this game strategy a little further. Should they actually win the case, they need to look no further than Spain to see what might happen. Remember, Spain passed a ridiculous law that not only put such a tax on aggregators but made it mandatory. It was clearly nothing more than a “Google tax” for Spanish publishers. Google’s response? It pulled out the nuclear option and shut down Google News in Spain.

So even if VG Media and the German publishers “win” this lawsuit, there’s a decent chance that they still end up shooting themselves in their collective foot, by pushing away one of the most popular news aggregators that drives a tremendous amount of traffic. It really makes you wonder about the thought process of the folks who run VG Media.

Filed Under: aggregation, ancillary copyright, copyright, germany, google news, google tax, snippets, traffic
Companies: google, vg media

Germany Wants To Define A Snippet As Seven Words Or Less; Doing So Is Likely To Breach Berne Convention

from the how-copyright-maximalism-defeats-itself dept

Techdirt has been following with a certain amusement the humiliating failure of German publishers to bring in a “snippet tax” that would force Google and other search engines to pay for displaying even short quotations from their publications. The most recent defeat for the copyright industry was the German competition authority announcing that it would not “punish” Google for refusing to take out a license for snippets because, well, Google had a perfect right not to do so. The Disruptive Competition (DisCo) Project Web site has an update on the continuing saga, and it’s as crazy as the rest of the story:

> The Copyright Arbitration Board of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) recently recommended that snippets, i.e. small text excerpts used by search engines and online aggregators below hyperlinks, can comprise exactly seven words. This suggestion is part of the DPMA’s recommendation to privately settle a dispute between online services and press publishers over Germany’s ancillary copyright, also termed the ‘snippet levy’. Should a court confirm this recommendation, snippets which go beyond this limit of seven words would in theory have to be licensed from news publishers.

As the DisCo post goes on to explain, that weirdly precise limit is a result of a last-minute change to the German snippet law, which carved out “individual words and smallest text excerpts” from its scope. Of course, that begs invites the question: how big could that “smallest text excerpt” be? For reasons that are not clear, the Copyright Arbitration Board suggested that the answer was “seven words long”. The DisCo post points out there would be an interesting and unexpected consequence of adopting that seven-word limit on snippets officially: it would put Germany in conflict with its obligations under the Berne Convention on copyright. In the 1967 revision to the Convention, a mandatory right to “short quotations” was changed to one allowing “quotations”. Here’s why that matters:

> imagine a situation in which snippets, a modern form of quotations, are reduced to seven words. From a practical point of view, it is safe to say that they are useless for Internet users who would find it difficult to find the information they are actually looking for. From a legal point of view, most would probably agree that a seven word quotation is rather ‘short’ — and exactly this conflicts with international copyright law which guarantees meaningful (and useful) quotations going beyond ‘short’ quotations.

In a delicious irony, then, the German publishers’ insane pursuit of the completely unworkable “ancillary” copyright protection for snippets could result in the country breaching fundamental obligations under the world’s main copyright convention.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: berne convention, copyright, germany, internet, quoting, snippets

Study Of Spain's 'Google Tax' On News Shows How Much Damage It Has Done

from the ancillary-copyright-is-a-bad-idea dept

As you may recall, governments across Europe, generally at the behest of traditional newspaper publishers, have been pushing for what they call an “ancillary copyright,” but which is much better referred to as a “snippet tax” or a “link tax.” Or, if people are being honest: a Google News tax. The idea is that any aggregator site that is linking out to other sources with little snippets telling people what’s at the link, has to pay the original publication to link to them. If you think this goes against the entire concept of the internet, you’re not wrong. Belgium was the first country to try it, and Google responded by removing complaining publications from Google News. In response, the publications then complained that Google News was being mean to them, even though they were the ones complaining. In Germany, a similar thing happened, whereby Google left the complaining publications in Google News, but without snippets since that was a key aspect of the law. Again, the publishers screamed “unfair” even though they were the ones who had pushed for the law in the first place.

When it came time for Spain to try to appease its misguided and angry publishers, the government sought to avoid the tactics that Google had done in the past and thus made it mandatory to pay, saying that sites themselves couldn’t even opt-out of getting payments, even if they didn’t want them. In response to this, Google broke out the somewhat surprising “nuclear option” and shut down Google News in Spain entirely. It seemed quite obvious that this move would create huge problems for media properties that wanted to be open and wanted people to link to them.

After the law went into effect, the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodical Publications (AEEPP) commissioned an economic study about the impact of the new Spanish ancillary copyright law — and found (not surprisingly) that the legal change (and the shuttering of Google News and other aggregators) was absolutely harmful to the Spanish news media and innovation in general. It also found strong evidence that, contrary to what those fighting against Google News have claimed, aggregators expand the market for the original sources, rather than shrink it by acting as a substitute. The latter is based on a “study of studies” basically, looking at all of the academic literature in terms of the impact of aggregators — all of which shows that it increases the overall size of the market, rather than shrinks it.

However, the really telling part of the report is that this law that was passed in the name of helping news publications, ended up doing tremendous harm to many online publications — especially smaller sites that frequently (and happily) relied on Google News and other aggregators for a significant amount of traffic. The report points out that it wasn’t just Google News that shut down because of this law: a whole bunch of local Spanish aggregators shut down themselves, switched business models entirely, or similarly left the Spanish market entirely. The report notes that sites like Planeta Ludico, NiagaRank, InfoAliment and Multifriki shut down entirely, as they were scared of the economic and legal liability from the new law. The report notes the case of NiagaRank is particularly troubling as it has a wider impact on innovation in Spain:

NiagaRank: ignoring the extent, quantity and methods followed to determine whether they should pay the fee, they preferred to close down. This case is remarkable because NiagaRank was not a ?traditional? aggregator, but it analysed social networks to draw up lists with the most relevant news (?active listening?, as they used to call it). However, it is an example of the legal uncertainty that the lack of definition of key aspects of the act has caused.

[….]

For example, and as already pointed out, currently there are several services focused on the aggregation of content for mobile phones, such as the mobile applications Zite and Flipboard. The amendment to the act will discourage the introduction of this sort of services in Spain, as well as the potential development of new models. A clear example of this situation is the portal NiagaRank, an innovative aggregator based on the analysis of the content published on social networks (similar to News360 or Prismatic) which, as mentioned before, also closed down as a direct result of the law amendment.

And all of this has had a tremendous negative impact on the press, rather than a positive one as those behind the law insisted.

The negative impact on the online press sector is also very clear, since a very important channel to attract readers disappears, resulting in lower revenues from advertising. In addition, the new fee is also a barrier to the expansion of small publications with little-known brands, and an entry barrier for new competitors, since they will be unable to count on these platforms to increase their readers? base.

The evidence available so far shows that the impact on traffic has been negative and that less consolidated publishing titles, such as digital native newspapers, have been the worst affected. This is not only because the total number of publication readers has been reduced but, in the case of online readers that would be attracted anyway (that is, who would visit the publications web sites in some other way), they will surely end up visiting known publications with established brands, to the detriment of small and new publications, in line with the evidence in the literature analysed above

Of course, for the major newspaper publishers, maybe that’s what they really wanted all along: less competition. But it’s difficult to see how that’s a legitimate public policy strategy.

And, not surprisingly, looking at multiple different ways of measuring these things, traffic to all Spanish news sites dropped after the law went into effect:

A simple traffic analysis of Spanish digital newspapers in the first three months of 2015 based on data from ComScore also suggests results in line with the aforementioned. The impact of the closing down of Google News and some other aggregators has generated a decline of visitors to the 84 major Spanish online newspapers…

The report notes that this is even more stunning given that overall internet traffic and usage in Spain has been increasing, so even the percentage drop in traffic undercounts the real impact, as it likely would have been growing.

The data, not surprisingly, shows that the impact on smaller news publishers has been the worst — again consistent with the idea that all this law really does is lock out competition for the larger players:

A more detailed analysis, breaking down traffic depending on the newspaper size, also confirms that the effect has been uneven. Thus, for the sample of online newspapers in Spain, it appears that smaller newspapers have been the worst affected ones.

All of this should really raise serious questions about just what is the intent of the Spanish government in passing this law. It does not appear to serve any legitimate public policy. At best, it appears to have damaged small news publications, making it more difficult for them to compete against larger publications, though it has also served to damage those larger publications’ traffic as well.

Filed Under: aggregation, ancillary copyright, copyright, google tax, innovation, snippet tax, snippets, spain
Companies: google, niagarank

Austria Wants To Bring In Google Tax For Snippets — Including Single Words

from the how-low-can-you-go? dept

Here on Techdirt, we have been following with a certain bemusement attempts by a number of European governments to bring in laws that would grant newspaper and magazine owners a special “ancillary” copyright over snippets — actually a thinly-disguised attempt to tax Google. Despite the miserable failure of this ploy, Austria has decided it wants to join the club, as reported here by the Initiative Against Ancillary Copyright site:

> The Austrian proposal is very similar to the German law. Producers of “newspapers and magazines” shall be granted an exclusive right only against commercial providers of search engines and news aggregators. As in Germany, this right is also supposed to only last for one year. But there remains one big difference: The draft does not include an exception for “single words and shortest text-snippets” which expands the scope of the right tremendously!

That’s something of an understatement.

Assuming Austria goes ahead and brings in this change (it’s currently a draft amendment to the country’s copyright law), it will surely learn the hard way that it doesn’t help publishers. What’s more worrying is that there is an amendment (number 204 – pdf) to the proposed revision of the EU copyright directive, that seeks to bring in this crazy idea across all 28 member states:

> Notes that the current legal framework provides for neighbouring rights for performers, phonogram producers, film producers and broadcasting companies, but not for press publishers; calls on the Commission, therefore, to analyse whether neighbouring rights for press publishers can provide appropriate protection and remuneration for their work in a digital media world;

There’s an important vote on Tuesday that will determine whether that amendment is adopted, along with some of the hundreds of others that have been proposed. Let’s hope that the European politicians bear in mind how badly the idea has turned out every time it has been tried before.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: aggregators, ancillary, ancillary rights, austria, copyright, germany, google tax, snippets
Companies: google