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

On 17 Jan 2021, at 20:18, Gavin Nicol <gtn@rbii.com> wrote:

> 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.

There is nothing particularly inevitable in any business model, apart from the inevitability that unsustainable business models will eventually collapse. This could collapse through economic pressure (parties go out of business, service providers withdraw service provision) or regulatory pressure, and this thread has come about through a proposed regulation. Content aggregators have no more or less right to exist than the content producers themselves.

This is an opportunity for the web to be ahead of the curve and lead the discussion, rather than having stuff imposed upon us from regulators that in the long run causes trouble for people involved.

Your mention of the music industry is a good point - they were aggregating long before the internet came along (eg radio). Rights management (used in the sense that the advertising people use it in my experience) is pretty low tech, usually involving plain text read by people to describe what you can and can't do with something, which isn’t ideal. This isn’t to be confused with copy protection, which is something different.

I think the missing piece is to give the ability for a resource owner to declare in a machine readable way what the license is on their resource. The aggregator can then query the licence, and then either accept the terms of the license or reject the terms. Those terms might be “pay me royalties if you are a commercial entity” (keeping Wikipedia able to link to content).

This could drive the diversification of content aggregators. One aggregator might charge a subscription to allow access to paid for content, where both the aggregator and the resource owner get paid. Another aggregator might refuse to pay resource owners, but be limited in the quality of their content.

All of this could potentially be backed up by existing copyright and rights management legislation.

TL;DR: Allow resource owners to publish the licence of their resource, independently of the content of the resource.

Regards,
Graham
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