It's true, journalism is a tough business, but that doesn't justify bending the rules in their favor.
Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much money out of it.
I wasn't advocating for a position -- I also think this law will have unintended negative consequences.
My point is simply that this is more than just linking. It's a full-on parasitic relationship, where Google (and Meta, and others) take the reporting that others are doing and build their own traffic off of that, while draining the people doing the work dry. News orgs are then faced with a terrible choice -- cut off the source of traffic or give it away for free. That's different than a dev deciding to open source a project.
I think the mistake here is that news orgs are trying to invent a business transaction where there isn't any. Either what Google/Meta are doing is copyright infringement in which case they have to stop or pay to license the content itself, or it's not and they're free to keep on keeping on. I would be surprised that after 30 years of public search engines we're just now deciding that it's copyright infringement. You could argue the summaries are for sure, but regular search results and the little context snippets that show what part of the article matched your query seem totally fine.
Search engines and social networks don't owe sites they link or their users link to any traffic. It would be silly to be like, "it's only copyright infringement if users don't click through the link enough."
Yes, and it gets even more fun when the source is summarizing your page, and feeding it to their AI assistant, so they stop sending you much traffic.
The business model of links + ads is going to be more in peril in the future than it is today, regardless of the regulatory environment. We see the problem all over media: If you are relying on google to give you traffic, your content better be really cheap and SEO'd to death, or be a funnel where most content is hidden, trying to drive people into subscriptions. Agglomeration in the traffic driving and ad spaces leads to them taking most of the profit unless there's agglomeration on the other end. Just like in American healthcare, more people using the same insurance companies that try to drag reimbursement rates down is met by hospital networks gobbling up practices and pharmacies, as to get market power that the insurer cannot ignore. So we'll see situations where, say, Google and the NYT have to decide whether the search traffic is worth it, and what's the right price for letting the latest AI ingest the entire contents of the Times.
It's not about moral good or bad, but about how incentive structures leave us with few viable economic models. Both software engineers and journalists will change behavior to make more money.
> Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
I do think there should be some laws around funding certain open source software that has become critical to the functioning of society -- whether or not that's paid by tax payers in general, or by the companies using that software is a different question though.
Government funded open source strikes me as something that can very much make sense, in certain cases. Some software very much operates at utility scale, and yet, doesn't have a funding model beyond the good will of volunteers. This is dangerous, and also the type of situation that the government exists to solve.
So, yes, companies probably should pay for at least some open source software, maybe indirectly through tax, maybe through some other mechanism.
You can make the likely accurate claim that democracy can't function without functional, effective independent journalism. So how much is it worth requiring so that democracy is upheld?
Just like Open Source is though: you do all the work, companies make money off of your work without paying a dime 95% of the time, etc. Would that justify a law forcing companies to pay for the open source software they use? No.
In the end, people choose to do open source knowing that they're not going to get much money out of it.