My biggest problem with Medium is not the platform, but the licensing. I don't like my content being simply licensed to them.
How would they publish it on their website if it wasn't licensed to them?
Disclaimer: I may be an idiot.
Internetting is hard.
If we want to continue with newspaper stand analogies, Medium would be like a newspaper stand that has one copy of each newspaper and magazine it distributes, and has a photocopier. When a customer wants a copy, that newsstand uses the photocopier to make one for them.
There is a legal exemption for "dumb pipe" in EU law: https://copyrightblog.co.uk/2012/10/17/what-is-a-temporary-c... which had to be put in because otherwise every single router on a TCP/IP connection would require copyright licensing.
Your browser renders the page by means of making a copy, which requires a license to you. Usually this is granted by the website. It has been argued in some places that this includes a right to control the "integrity of the presentation", that is that you're not licensed to display the page if you block ads.
People ignore it takes some effort to "publish" content. The dissemination of said content is such that we don't really respect, at all, these "publishers".
I don't really have a point, am just slightly annoyed to be reminded such plumbing is, in fact, a business model.
All these services are obviously reproducing their users' copyrighted works. To do that they need that license. The difference to and ISP is that they change these works (or at least their representation) and a few others. That exemption, as well as those for caches and search engines, are codified in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_....