> google simply steal the most valuable bit, the headline and the summary
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.
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.