Google, Facebook should be regulated as publishers

Re We must join Australia in battle with Facebook, Opinion, Feb. 22

SOCAN (rights management organization for musicians and visual artists) can serve as a model to collect and distribute royalties when news articles are published by social media.

I can appreciate Facebook’s reluctance to have to enter into individual negotiations with each newspaper or news outlet; such a system is unwieldy.

Canada needs to establish a news collective along the model of SOCAN, which would give social media outlets the automatic right to republish news articles for a known royalty. The

Intellectual Property Centre provides a similar example. The IPC’s mandate could be expanded to meet the needs of news writers and the use of their works by social media.

Canadian law needs to define social media outlets such as Google and Facebook as “publishers,” subject to the same legal rights and responsibilities. The ability to sue these publishers for libel or slander would help rein in some of the worst of their behaviour.

Google and Facebook have been hiding under the guise of being media platform sharing tools.

In the music world, similar giants such as Napster have been abolished in favour of services like Spotify that license songs and pay royalties. Writers of news and their publishers deserve no less.

In SOCAN or the IPC, we have proven workable models. Let’s adopt the same for news! Mary Kainer, Toronto