French news titles sue X over allegedly running their content without payment | Hacker News Reader

French news titles sue X over allegedly running their content without payment

theguardian.com

13 pointsLordAtlas7 comments

There's something wild about news organizations demanding payment from someone providing them free advertising.

You'd expect it to be the other way around.

Perhaps Twitter should start demanding payments from French news organizations to offset these royalties and ban links to those who refuse.

There is something disturbing about your take on this: 1) People who did the work do not deserve to be compensated. 2) Advertising is more valuable than the product being advertised. I am struggling to understand this mindset.

Advertising isn't typically more valuable than the product being advertised (though that depends entirely on the consumer), but what is the product being used by Twitter?

Twitter is using a headline and maybe an image, provided by the news organizations specifically to act as an advertisement to get people to click on it and a link.

In this case, the value being provided to the news organizations is almost certainly higher than the value provided to Twitter. Meta certainly seems to have thought so.

Certainly news organizations should be paid by those who find their products valuable, but demanding payment for small quotes, something supposedly protected by international treaties as fair use, seems rather hypocritical for news organizations who are in the business of quoting others.

Isn't this going to play out exactly like it did in Canada and Facebook where Facebook doesn't link to Canadian news sources and everyone is annoyed?

I always saw social media as an effective distribution mechanism for media. If your content is disposable or replaceable, so you're not benefitting from the traffic, that seems like an issue with the publication, not the social media platform.

X already offers compensation for accounts with a lot of engagement, which was something that was not offered until recently. So I'm not sure why newspapers can't benefit from that, and it would be on the same playing field as everyone else. But my guess is they want a special deal where there's none to be made, which will lead to X just blocking the content.

On a related note, it would be good if we had a word for a 'cookie banner' type result, which could be defined as an unanticipated result that's objectively worse for everyone involved.

> On a related note, it would be good if we had a word for a 'cookie banner' type result

Malicious compliance.

It will probably play out the exact same way it did 7 months ago [1] with X being fined by the state.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/20/google-fi...

I don't think the cookie thing is malicious compliance though, considering every single company dealt with it in the same way. There are armies of product people that obsess over the tiniest details of these products, to think that, across the board, all companies would accept this giant ugly invasive cookie banner on their site to stick it to European authorities just strikes me as unlikely.

In terms of facebook blocking Canadian media, its just not worth it to them. Presumably they crunched the numbers and decided sharing revenue with them isn't worth the hassle or the lost traffic, so they chose not to do so.

You're welcome to read the ePrivacy Directive [1] [2]. It makes no mention of a full page banner that requires interaction before reading a webpage.

Every company implementing something a certain way should be really believable though. It's a compliance feature so you want to implement it the same way as everybody else so if a regulator complains you can point to everybody else as a defense.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive#Cookies

[2]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com