Nobody promised for news sources that their business model would be free of risk...

Kliment · on July 5, 2018

I don't think this will kill news aggregation, and I don't see how it will strengthen newspapers - the biggest aggregators will just strike a deal with publishers to not pay them anything in exchange for not delisting them. The smaller aggregators cannot afford to license snippets and aren't big enough to matter to the publishers so they will just stop publishing snippets. There is no case where publishers (and even less so investigative journalists) win from this. We've seen this in Germany and Spain where this was implemented in national law.

However, the actual victims of this are another group. The law specifies "commercial users" as ones that have to comply with this but does not define what "commercial use" is. In Germany, courts have ruled "commercial use" to be very broadly interpreted, and it would cover things like forums that collect user donations to cover server costs, or have advertising for the same reason. They are clearly not making money from news aggregation, but the way the law is written any kind of commercial use is the same and has to comply. So now they have to police all their users just to make sure they don't post a news snippet, and there is no minimal size for news snippets. So in the worst case you can no longer discuss news on a forum without making the forum operator liable for license fees to whoever published the news. As a forum operator, how am I supposed to know whether something is news or not? Do I have to screen every post and compare against a list? The law doesn't say. The committee proposed an exemption for user-submitted content but the proposer of the law shot it down. So now here we are. Forum operators have to police their users against unclear criteria or face legal liability. I think that's a chilling effect, and it has no upside.

If you want to strengthen investigative journalism, do exactly that - put more money into EU-wide funds to fund investigations, for example, or make it safer for them to report by implementing EU-wide protections for journalists (to prevent what happened in Poland from happening elsewhere for example). Or regulate ownership of mass media to prevent concentration of power. There's lots of things you can do on an European level to strengthen journalism and democracy. This is definitely not it.