Jonathan GerhardsonGoogle to end online news access in Canada in response to the Online News Act
Please provide me with arguments about why this is a good idea. I have a tenuous understanding of Canadian law and am leaning towards it not being a good idea.
C.It isn't a good idea. It's a #terrible idea that #politicians in #Canada latched on to to show they're "standing up to big US tech companies", and which the big Canadian #media backed as (what they thought would be) a big cash cow.
I'm 100% with you that the #government has no business deciding what qualifies as "#news".
Canadian media companies are going to see their traffic drop 50-80% - including the ones with no seat at the negotiating table.
@cazabon I'm all for people getting paid fairly, and regulating industries to do so if need be. But every attempt I've seen to do this with the news media industry inevitably runs into some weird free speech stuff.
In the U.S. there was a (failed) proposal to give everyone a ~$300 tax rebate to spend on news subscriptions. Maybe I'm being absurd, but IMO unless you can spend that money on like Fortnite skins and porno mags, I don't know how you can claim to have a "free press."
@cazabon on second thought, there's probably some sane middle ground, at least theoretically.
Copyright covers it.
Search/social media companies show a #snippet of the #article, and #link back to the original #site to read the full #article. That's fine, and shouldn't need #payment.
But if they're #copying more of the original article than is necessary for that purpose, eliminating those visits to the original site and benefiting #commercially, they're #violating the site's #copyright, and should pay #damages and #penalties for that.