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Comment by scribu | Hacker News Reader

I think this article on simple linking vs. previewing sums up the issue:

https://theconversation.com/webs-inventor-says-news-media-ba...

Awesome summary. It seems to me that this is a bit of a failure of the fair use doctrine. Making one preview of an image or article does not impact the author's monetisation ability. Making a business out of systematically producing previews (and adding your own ads around them) should no longer quality as fair use.

We have a joke:

A: How much is a drop of gas?

B: A drop of gas? Well, zero!

A: One million drops of gas, please.

Fair use (or i guess fair dealing in australia) isn't totally about not negatively impacting other people's businesses. It helps your fair use argument if you don't impact, but there are plenty of clear cases where its fair use despite negative business impact. For example writing a scathing negative review of something that has quotes for context.

You are right. By "business impact" I was rather thinking that the aggregator simply diverts ad revenue, without adding any value. If I made a business which summaries other books without sharing revenue, I would likely get busted.

Why do you think that? I'm pretty sure that the cole's notes series of books do not share revenue nor do the summaries on good reads.

Straight up copying of course would be different.

The stated rationale for the law is not copyright infringement, so fair use is not relevant. It’s an attempt by Australia’s competition (antitrust) regulator to address an alleged market failure: “The proposed bargaining code is intended to address bargaining power imbalances between Australian news media businesses and digital platforms in order to ensure that commercial arrangements between these parties do not undermine the ability and incentives for news media businesses to produce news for Australians.” https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20-%20Mandatory%20...

I'm reading between the lines, but my understanding of the (fixed) new law is that "plain linking" would still be okay, "previewing" would require sitting at the table. What's the difference between the two?

Plain linking does not keep people on FB. Automated previewing does. Can't this be interpreted as raising the bar for fair use?

The bill says “the responsible digital platform corporation must ensure that the supply of the digital service does not, in relation to crawling, indexing, making available and distributing news businesses’ covered news content ... differentiate between registered news businesses and news businesses that are not registered news businesses ...” I don’t see any distinction between linking and previewing here. I think both involve “making the content available,” and since Facebook legally can’t “differentiate between” news content that is and isn’t covered by the mandatory bargaining code, they are choosing not to make news content available at all to Australian users.

I don't know the legal status but I've always been uneasy about rich snippets and other things on Google search. It is common that I get my answer and never have to visit the site, meaning Google gets their ad money and the site gets nothing more than a name drop.

But you have to play that silly game, because otherwise your competitor might get featured instead and we learn about them and not you.

I wonder if FB ever offered or considered letting users link without previews (e.g., choose a word or words of their post to become the link text). It would defuse the way users scan headline/preview/image on the feed (instead of going to the publisher and reading the content). Not sure Australia would have accepted this but I believe it addresses some of their concerns.

You can, unless I am misunderstanding you. When I paste a link the preview pops up and I can hit the traditional (X) in the top right to remove it before posting. It will display the URL in text as a link without a preview.

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