Neighbouring rights
EU’s nod could alter how news is consumed
In response to an appeal by nine major European news agencies, the European Union is debating the extension of an existing copyright provision called “neighbouring rights”. This would give the agencies leverage to negotiate with Facebook, Google, Twitter and other such online news aggregators for payment for the millions of news articles they feature, or provide links to, on their platforms. If this goes through, it will change the current revenue model for news consumption and, perhaps, for other content as well.
The agencies point out that Google and Facebook do not have newsrooms. Nor do they bear the expenses of carrying out the difficult, and often dangerous, task of gathering, checking and curating news from diverse parts of the world. However, the online giants do receive a lot of eyeballs and generate huge amounts of advertising revenue from providing links to such news stories, “offering Internet users work done by others, the news media, by freely publishing hypertext links to their stories”. Under the current copyright laws, the online aggregators are not obliged to share this revenue with the content creators, and revenues for dedicated news media are dropping, thus making the expensive task of investigative reporting increasingly unsustainable.
Between them, Google and Facebook hold about 60-70 per cent market share of online advertising across the world. Facebook reportedly tripled its profits in 2016 to $10 billion. News articles are the second most popular category on social networks, exceeded in viewership only by posts related to friends and families. Google also saw a 20 per cent increase in profits in 2016, posting profits of $20 billion on revenues of $90 billion. Again, news is a big driver for the search engine giant across its multiple platforms.
This shift of revenues away from the content creator to the disseminator is not new. It started with the world wide web and it has been accentuated by social media. It is a classic example of technological disruption altering the value chain. There is logic on both sides. Google, Facebook and Twitter can argue that they have spent billions of dollars building platforms and deserve the right to monetise the eyeballs they gather. On the other hand, news agencies do need revenues to produce high-quality reporting. This is also a symbiotic relationship. If Google and Facebook stop linking to news then the revenue those news organisations depend on will decrease even more sharply. But at the same time, Google and Facebook will also lose eyeballs and revenues and suffer loss of credibility, too, since content from news agencies comes filtered for authenticity.
One solution being mooted is to extend the concept of “neighbouring rights” to news producers. Under current EU copyright laws, neighbouring rights are only available to authors, not to press publishers. This concept allows authors the right, with a tenure of 20 years, to control the reproduction of their content, and the right to make their content publicly available. If it is extended to publishers, the news agencies would then have control over the explanatory snippets typically used in online links. They could charge a fee for this and, thus, receive some advertising revenue.
Of course, given the monopolistic access they provide, the online giants could play hardball in terms of negotiating deals by threatening to selectively remove articles from news agencies that demand payment. Or they could fine-tune their algorithms to filter out anything that the surfer does not explicitly request to see. But such a change in the copyright regime could, at the very least, give the news agencies some leverage to try and grab a slice of advertising revenue. It would also open the door for individual bloggers, musicians and video content-creators to consider the possibility of implementing similar revenue-sharing models.