Why The Snippet Tax In The EU Copyright Directive Is Pointless And Doomed To Fail
from the chasing-the-dwindling-revenue dept
The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market contains two spectacularly bad ideas. One is the upload filter of Article 17, which will wreak havoc not just on creativity in the EU, but also on freedom of speech there, as algorithms block perfectly legal material. The other concerns the “snippet tax” of Article 15, more formally known as ancillary copyright..
Just as the impetus for the upload filter came from the music and film industries, so the lobbying for Article 15 came from newspaper publishers. The logic behind their demand, such as it was, seemed to be that Google was making money from ads on its pages that had some links to newspaper sites. That ignored two inconvenient facts. First, that Google’s dedicated news site, Google News, had precisely zero ads on its pages. And secondly, the pages on the main Google search engine that did have ads, had many other search hits alongside links to newspapers. And those links to newspaper sites send a considerable flow of traffic, that publishers have repeatedly shown they are desperate to have.
For example, in 2014, the German VG Media industry group demanded 11% of gross worldwide revenue on any search result that included one of their snippets. Google responded by dropping the snippets from its search results (but left the title and link). The publishers’ bluff was called, and they granted Google a “free license” to use snippets. If the publishers had really been concerned about Google’s use of snippets, they could easily have blocked the search engine’s Web crawler by using the robots.txt file, which is designed precisely for this kind of situation.
The fact that newspaper sites don’t routinely use robots.txt confirms this is simply about money, and the belief that Google is somehow to blame for the dwindling advertising revenue that newspapers receive nowadays. However, a fascinating analysis by Benedict Evans shows that the situation is much more complex than that:
About five years ago, a revenue line buried in the back of Amazon’s accounts started to get quite big. ‘Other revenue’ was over $4bn by the end of 2017, and if you looked at the notes to the notes, you discovered that this was ‘primarily’ advertising. By 2019 this had grown to $14bn, and I wrote about it here, pointing out that ‘Amazon’ was no longer just e-commerce and AWS [Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing offering], and had become a bundle of lots of different businesses, many of which were probably just as profitable as AWS. However, we still didn’t know exactly what ‘primarily’ meant. At the end of 2021 this changed: Amazon started splitting out the ad revenue directly, telling us that this is now a $31bn business.
Evans puts that in context by noting:
$31bn is roughly the same size as Google Display, YouTube, or the entire global newspaper industry’s ad business.
In other words, the newspaper industry’s obsession with Google is missing the larger point about an entirely new kind of advertising that appears on sites like Amazon. Evans rightly sees a huge move towards “merchant media” – advertising on e-commerce sites that have zero journalistic content of the traditional kind. That means it will not be possible to impose another snippet tax on these sites, because there are no snippets. While newspapers celebrate their “victory” in pushing gullible EU politicians to pass Article 15 targeted against Google and Facebook, the bulk of the revenue draining from traditional media sites is going elsewhere.
Originally published on WalledCulture.
Filed Under: advertising, ancillary copyright, classified ads, copyright directive, eu, link tax, newspapers
Comments on “Why The Snippet Tax In The EU Copyright Directive Is Pointless And Doomed To Fail”
These are not honest people
Evans rightly sees a huge move towards “merchant media” – advertising on e-commerce sites that have zero journalistic content of the traditional kind. That means it will not be possible to impose another snippet tax on these sites, because there are no snippets.
If you think that’s enough to stop them I’ve got an amazing bridge or two to sell you…
If snippets aren’t an angle of attack they’ll just pivot to arguing that tech companies need to ‘pay to support creativity and reporting’ and demand they be subsidized that way, or find some equally absurd argument for why other companies/industries need to pay and support them.
When you’re of the mindset that you are owed success and if someone else makes it where you failed then clearly they owe you ‘your’ cut, and as these parasites have shown they will do whatever they can to get that.
The problem with copyright laws is they never get revoked even if they make no sense
these laws will still stop people posting links or snippets or else people will switch to reading American websites like newser also the open Internet is built on the ability to post a link without asking permission or paying a publisher
Re:
Thing is the EU Copyright Directive is being taken to the European Court of Justice right now but we will have to wait to see the outcome.
Tho it looks like they may never get the upload filter of Article 17 up and running.
Re:
Getting up the upload filter was never the plan – at least, not a functioning one. Either a proper one will never come to fruition based on the technical impracticalities, or one will be deployed that inevitably carries all the issues of a system meant to favor copyright holders, just like YouTube’s ContentID or the DMCA.
All the copyright lobby wanted was something, anything that could get their foot in the door. If all else failed, and the upload filter can’t reasonably be produced, they can also rely on the good old excuse of “big tech companies are in bed with pirates” and hope nobody else notices that what they were asking for was never possible to begin with.
After all, lying about their intentions – and the upload filter which they claim would not have happened – got them as far as it did. There’s very little reason to believe that they’ll stop lying, if ever.
Bundling and unbundling the newspaper
That alternatives to classified ads are a big part of the decline of newspapers’ revenues will be surprising for… exactly nobody who paid attention to the countless articles on the “unbundling of the newspaper” written since at least 2002.
2002:
2008:
https://www.techdirt.com/2008/05/16/unbundling-the-newspaper-could-be-a-good-thing/
https://www.alchemyofchange.net/great-unbundling/
2010:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/308095/
The upload filter might be illegal in that it forces every small website or forum that might host a few user videos to filter every video even though only company’s like Google or Facebook wuld have acess to the database of all TV shows films owned by media company’s
Only big tech could afford to build filters or make a database of millions of videos and we have seen how open YouTube dmca process is open to fraud and over blocking legal content
Re:
“The upload filter might be illegal in that it forces…”
That wouldn’t make it illegal, just stupid. A common thread here is that in trying to punish major US corporations, the effect might be to make them an actual monopoly. We already saw this with attacking Google News in Spain (Google said FU, smaller publishers suffered) and any tax on standard usage would cause smaller players to shut down in a similar way.
A thing
HOw many sites are built on AWS?
And AWS supplies the adverts?
Even for MOST of those Newspapers, and other sites, unless you are Hooked up with Google, you will be running AWS adverts.
Then we get the interesting part.
How many sites run as many Adverts as they can? and from different agencies.
Even with Only google and Amazon, you can have 4-10 adverts on your site, easily. on every page. Google and Amazon may be getting Pennies per click, but THATS ALLOT OF PENNIES.
Re:
“HOw many sites are built on AWS?”
As many that choose to use AWS instead of its many available competitors. AWS do nothing that isn’t replicated elsewhere, sometimes for less cost.
“How many sites run as many Adverts as they can? and from different agencies.”
Plenty. Which means the ad providers are not monopolies by your definition.
“Google and Amazon may be getting Pennies per click, but THATS ALLOT OF PENNIES.”
OK. How many pennies would the target sites be getting if they neither provided the ads or the traffic? If Google and Amazon are getting a cut because they drive traffic to the sites that also get a cut, what’s the problem?
You too, gettyimages (the company that sued google into removing its view image button because it enabled users to steal images), you could’ve use that to put paid images behind that robots exclusion standard. Just a few lines of code in a text file at the root directory of the URL is all it takes, instead of going through a complex, expensive, and time consuming lawsuit.