German Government Neo-Luddism

[Dreadnaught]

The article says the law is proposing to charge people for using snippets of articles on their news aggregation services, not for linking.

I think you might be confusing French with Sweden? That's where it's from anyway. Most European countries have them by now I think.

Heh, just looked it up, there's also a few in the USA.


As I understand it, the point is against showing articles, or parts thereof. Which is actually denying them traffic (and revenue) that you said they are providing in your first post (and generating traffic for the search engines or aggregate sites). And for 'luddite' anti-copyright-infringement stuff that goes against the very idea of the internet you don't have to leave your own country (SOPA anyone? Before you ask, I did check out what was in that bill before jumping on the anti-SOPA bandwagon). That said, I think the law is a bad idea, mostly because it seems rather arbitrary at what are newspapers and what aren't.

You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it actually means.

Next up: We go on to prove how the various levels of lobbyism in Washington prove that the US is a deeply luddite country.

Luddism is a movement against technology which is perceived as evil.
This particular movement is not against the technology per se, but rather about protecting profits.

By your logic, any and all kinds of lobbying for protection against some new movement or other is luddite. Which then makes your country the king of the luddites.

Indeed, I think this is about more than news aggregators. The definition of "news aggregator" that's apparently being used is indistinguishable from a search engine. And the criteria basically puts a red flag around *any* type of hyperlinking.

Sites like Bing News and Google News post a prominent link to a news story and a small snippet (usually less than two dozen words). It's an invitation to go to the news source, not a replacement. And these links send literally millions of visits per year to the news sources. And they do it for free.

EG here's a great list of stories on Bing News about Heart Attack Grill: http://www.bing.com/news/search?q=Heart+Attack+Grill

The links are indistinguishable from any other search engine results, except they are filtered to only include news sources. If the news sites can get Bing or Google to pay them to give them free traffic, why can't anyone get money from Google and Bing for appearing in their index? This reeks of rent-seeking, and it's an attack on the basic principles of hyperlinking. The news organizations are acting like luddites and trying to destroy the technology they mistakenly believe is putting them out of work.

Put another way...

Newspaper websites can reduce their traffic by 32.08% by simply asking Google to stop sending them traffic.

Written By Shafqat

In what can only be seen as great news amongst all the doom and gloom for newspapers recently, it seems like newspapers are having the opposite problem to the one we expected: they are getting way too much traffic. So much traffic in fact, that many newspapers are calling out and asking for help from search engines and news aggregators. Organizations such as News Corp and the Associated Press are asking for search engines to stop indexing their content so as not to send them any more free traffic. The ones that are especially inundated by traffic (i.e WSJ) are also asking news aggregators to stop linking to them and imploring them to reduce the traffic sent. By not linking, newspapers can also ensure that their Google PageRanks don’t get any higher since the consequences are severe: even more traffic than they can handle.

In a surprising move, even the Guardian Media Group, an organization that normally enjoys and appreciates incoming traffic is asking for the government to review the role of news aggregators like Google News.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to guage the severity of the “traffic abundance” problem and see how Google and other news aggregators can come to the newspaper’s rescue. With some help from Robin Goad at the Hitwise Blog, I was able to get some statistics to shed some more light here. Although this data is based on UK data, I’m fairly sure it is representative of the wider world as well (in either case, let’s assume some margin of error).

According to the statistics, newspaper websites can reduce their traffic by 32.08% by simply asking Google to stop sending them traffic. If they ask Facebook and Yahoo to stop linking, they can reduce by a further 4.69%. If they really want to reduce traffic even further, they can shut down all news aggregators and that should comfortably reduce their traffic by around 40%. That will leave them with 60% of the current traffic, which I imagine should satisfy their current needs.

Jeff Jarvis, who knows a thing or two about the news business says “Google is far and away the most productive means of sending audience to news sites.” (OK, so he said that two years ago, but he’s ahead of the pack). As such, it is no surprise that newspapers are turning to Google immediately to help solve their current traffic overload problems.

Finally, Jay Rosen also has a great post about this exact same issue, also from two years ago. It seems like these traffic spurts come in cycles, and we’re in the middle of a veritable plague of traffic and readers. The only way to escape this plague is to shut down the aggregators, turn off Google, turn away atleast 40% of your readers and wait for it to pass.

http://blog.newscred.com/?p=182

[Steely Glint]

Indeed, I think this is about more than news aggregators. The definition of "news aggregator" that's apparently being used is indistinguishable from a search engine. And the criteria basically puts a red flag around *any* type of hyperlinking.

That's according to the bills opponents, though, not necessarily what's in the actual bill. It would be very easy to legislate to exclude the items title from this law.

That said, I think you're basically right here. A few pieces of information.

a) It is the easiest thing in the world to control whether or not you appear on Google et al. Just make a file on your sever called robots.txt and write 'noindex, nofollow' in it. Bang, you vanish from google and everyone else. You can do this for individual pages, so search engines can index your category pages but not specific articles if you want.
b) You can control exactly what appears in the snippets used by search engines by setting a meta description tag. Google's news aggregation service seems to honour this as well. If news organisations were actually concerned about their copyrighted news articles appearing on Google snippets, they can just put something else in the meta description and that will get used instead.
c) If you look at the HTML on any given news article, you'll see they already do this. Not only do they use the meta description tag, but also use facebook's open graph meta tags. So their pages are already optimised to appear on search engines or be shared on facebook. So they can't be that butthurt over it.

So, yeah.

[CitizenCain]

c) If you look at the HTML on any given news article, you'll see they already do this. Not only do they use the meta description tag, but also use facebook's open graph meta tags. So their pages are already optimised to appear on search engines or be shared on facebook. So they can't be that butthurt over it.

And why not? Not like these guys are the only ones who try to use the government to have their cake and eat it too, or that blatant hypocrisy matters for much anyway.