Talk:News Media Bargaining Code

Just what is the code asking for?!

Can we get a better break down of what the law covers in semi-layman’s terms?

- The article makes it sound as though the law calls for _all_ revenue generated by links be paid.

- Does google have to pay simply for having the link? It cannot be that simple. If anything, the link will direct a user to the site which will allow the site to earn ad revenue; that _helps_ the site. Is the charge to google actually due to their teaser of the article content? Is it due to the headline?

- Does Facebook have to pay when a newspaper posts their own article or is Facebook scraping and posting newspaper sites without permission? (I do not use Facebook, so I do not know what they do)

It would be great to have a proper breakdown of what the law calls for and what its rationale is (ie. what activity do the writers of the law claim google and Facebook are doing that profits off the newspapers. Are they grabbing data? More than headlines? Are the newspapers posting data?)

I had hoped that the “History” section would give a history behind the law, not a history of reactions _to_ the law. --Bertrc (talk) 17:49, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Bertrc, it appears to be that bad, which would explain why it's getting international news coverage. The motivation appears to be protectionism. If you end up researching this and find more detailed answers, feel free to add what you find to the article. –Novem Linguae (talk) 23:22, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@Bertrc: Motivation is to generate income for a dying but powerful media industry by getting successful and profitable businesses to pay for content from, and hyperlinks to, content defined under the law as "news". Federal election may be this year, and the local media is biased towards incumbent political party. Under the law, "news" is defined so broadly it covers the weather (which is why the Australian Bureau of Meteorology was filtered), and even this very Wikipedia article. Facebook doesn’t "scrape", but when users post hyperlinks it does build an "icon" that hyperlinks to original content, where "icon" depicts an annotated summary of what users would see if they clicked on it, all fair use and observing copyright, so users visit the original content. Publishers also post their own content, and actively participate in grooming content and hyperlinks to their content.

The law doesn’t conflate content and hyperlinks because it explicitly covers links, but most non-technical people including journalists in particular clearly do conflate the two and incorrectly say Facebook is getting away with stealing their work (which would be wrong) when in fact they aren't, so there is a lot of misinformation spinning around especially now in the current media frenzy about an event in a country that continues to struggle with fair use. Betterkeks (talk) 00:37, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@Betterkeks: I think you're slightly confused. Australia does not have fair use period. While there have been proposals to introduce fair use, these have so far not succeeded History of fair use proposals in Australia. It's therefore impossible for something to be all "fair use" in Australia. It may have been fair use in the US, but from the PoV of the Australian government that's clearly irrelevant. Whether what Facebook and Google were doing by including snippets of content and so reducing the need for readers to check out the whole article, was covered by Fair dealing#Australia, that I'm not going to say, any comment that it was or wasn't should be supported by RS if editors are going to make this claim even on talk pages IMO. Nil Einne (talk) 10:31, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

@Nil Einne: Please read my post again, and the two articles I linked to: Fair use and History of fair use proposals in Australia. The doctrine of "fair use" applies in Australia as "fair dealing", and reading Copyright Act 1968, section 42 (Fair dealing for purpose of reporting news) "a fair dealing [... ] does NOT constitute an infringement of the copyright in the work IF [... ] reporting of news in a newspaper, magazine or similar periodical AND a sufficient acknowledgement of the work is made". Given that (1) Facebook SURELY is a "newspaper, magazine or similar periodical", (2) the hyperlink itself is an extreme abstraction only, so extreme it is a unique work in its own right, and (3) the news article is hyperlinked and the only way to read the work is to traverse the hyperlink to access the actual news article, that is, it isn’t just sufficiently acknowledged but, rather, perfectly acknowledged – and if you’re reading the work, you’re not reading a copy but the work itself! Betterkeks (talk) 14:31, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

What are the limits of this law?

The bill talks about "links" and "content". So would a URL shown as text only (that is, it isn’t a hyperlink you can click on but just a URL; for example, facebook.com/about) constitute a link under this law? What about an obvious encoding such as "facebook dot com slash about”? What about a citation without a hyperlink and without a URL, would that be a link under this law? For example, Easton, William (31 August 2020). "An Update About Changes to Facebook's Services in Australia". Facebook Australia & New Zealand. Retrieved 21 February 2021. Technically none of the above are “links”, but the law and logic are not always the same thing.

Could this kind of break the World Wide Web, and anything else that makes reference to anything that is "current"? You could no longer hyperlink to anything that is "current" (where "current" is not defined, but let’s assume it’s anything less than a year old) without the risk of being charged for it. This is terrible!!!

And what about quotes? Given that this law goes beyond fair use and copyright, would an inline quote, even when fair use and fully and properly attributed, constitute content?

Does this apply to academic writing?

Can it be applied retrospectively? What discourse is safe and what isn’t? What a loss of freedom of expression! Facebook and Google may be able to buy their way out of this, but others won’t so one possible consequence of this law may be in effect suppressing and suffocating public discourse of "current" events everywhere but "echo chambers" like mass media, Facebook and Google. This Wikipedia article currently exist in two other languages only, and I wonder what they say; see ru:Кодекс ведения переговоров со СМИ and vi:Dự luật Đàm phán Truyền thông Tin tức. Betterkeks (talk) 05:01, 23 February 2021 (UTC)