Don't they allow to show the contents of those feeds on websites?
And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow?
When I look at the content of the Toronto Star for example:
https://www.thestar.com/content/thestar/feed.RSSManagerServl...
My gut feeling is that showing those short snippets with a link to the articles should be fair use. Am I wrong?
If Google and Meta just generate free traffic for the news site, then I'm not really sure why they're complaining. If their write is straight up reproduced without permission then I understand.
Even on HN it’s not uncommon to see people commenting on articles they’ve only read the title of.
I don't understand anyone who just visits a general news site and reads arbitrary articles. I understand with physical newspapers, because they deliver it to your house in the morning and there was no alternative but to subscribe to multiple papers. I have to think that only senior citizens do it now. I only pay for outlets because I want them to be healthy and to continue publishing, and I don't personally care about some major city's establishment paper, and don't care whether it shuts down.
Fair use and copyright are 'artificial' legal constructs, so if they were defined in an 'arbitrary' way to begin with, they can be redefined to add or remove provisions. These online publishing laws could tweak those provisions.
Also: when an RSS/Atom feed is published, it is still copyrighted, and the terms and conditions would/could perhaps be defined what "fair use" is by copyright holder (maybe?).
But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a copyright violation"?
Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?
Seems like yes. From the article:
"The tech giant plans to remove news links from its search engine, Google News and Google Discover for only Canadian publishers and readers."