Re: Right to Link vs proposed Australian “link fee” legislation

It's certainly at least partly a licensing issue, and in a perfect world, people would be able to control and monetize the content they produce. The reality is that discoverability largely dictates the way people access content, giving advantage to the aggregators in terms of licensing, payments etc. That the aggregators also themselves create derivatives adds insult to injury (though gpt3 generated content that from models trained on publisher content may/may not be considered derivative).

A similar issue exists in music, but the rights there are even more clearly defined, and there are efforts across the board for figure out how to compensate creators for derivative works. Even so, discoverability and access is governed largely by a few aggregators that reap the benefits.

Unless you can remove the advantages that aggregation brings in terms of discoverability and access, these kinds of issues are inevitable. We've seen how these players can make or break the revenue streams of content producers by simply promoting or burying the search results, or tweaking the recommendation algorithms, which can, and has, been used as leverage in negotiation, generally at the expense of content producers.

On Sun, Jan 17, 2021, at 9:57 AM, Graham Leggett wrote:
> On 16 Jan 2021, at 19:36, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> > Has anyone noticed this call
> > https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/news-media-bargaining-code 
> > from the Australian government for comments on a plan to force Google and Facebook to pay money to news media businesses for content they display on their services?  This is a final call of a proposal whose first versions came out in July.
> > 
> > The web architecture issue here seems to be the right to link. The code, if it became law, would force Google search and Facebook Newsfeed [specifically]  to pay a fee to the owner of the destination content (news publisher) when the link is displayed, not even necessarily followed.
> > 
> > The architecture of the WWW generally involves the right to link to something with impunity -- is this proposal in direct with that right?
> > 
> > What do folks, and the TAG, think?
> 
> Looking from above, the issue looks like a licensing issue. Publishers own the rights to and want to license and profit from their work, but are thwarted from doing so by companies who are creating derivatives of their work without being paid for it. This has many parallels to software licenses, where your right (or lack of right) to make a derivative work is clearly spelled out.
> 
> The derivative work comes about when a news aggregator starts lifting elements of the news article, the headline, the lede, an image, and embeds that in the news aggregator, removing the reason for following the link in the first place.
> 
> From this I’d argue that the link itself isn’t the problem, it’s the incentive being removed to follow a link that’s the problem.
> 
> Thinking out loud, would the web architecture help by specifying metadata related to the license of the content? For example the license might be open (think Wikipedia) or might be limited (think a subscription to a newspaper). Key would be that the publisher had a machine readable mechanism (OPTIONS method?) to tell the world what to expect at the link. Example “come on in” (Wikipedia) or “seek permission to get access from that resource first” (Newspaper’s own controlled payment / micropayment gateway). The license might be a well known URL (eg CC) or a custom URL. The custom URL might represent a specific set of payments terms that a news aggregator would have signed up to.
> 
> OPTIONS /some-article HTTP/x.x
> 
> 200 OK
> License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
> 
> 200 OK
> License: https://newspaper.com/licenses/pay-us-to-use-this/
> 
> Regards,
> Graham
> —
> 
> 
>