Publishers' Protections Study: Notice and Request for Public Comment

See Michael Barthel & Kirsten Worden, Newspapers Fact Sheet, Pew Research Center (June 29, 2021), https://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/. Newspaper ad revenue peaked in the early internet era of the late 1990s and, after a brief dip in 2000-01, peaked again in 2005 following a wave of consolidation in the newspaper industry (including a steady decline in the number of cities with competing daily newspapers). Id.; see also Media Concentration (Part 2): Hearings Before the Subcomm. on Gen. Oversight and Minority Enter. of the H. Comm. on Small Bus., 96th Cong. 4-5 (1980) (statement of James M. Dertouzos, Economist, RAND Corp.) (presenting data on consolidation in local news outlets).

Elizabeth Grieco, Fast Facts about the Newspaper Industry's Financial Struggles as McClatchy Files for Bankruptcy, Pew Research Center (Feb. 14, 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/fast-facts-about-the(-newspaper-industrys-financial-struggles/ .

Newspapers Fact Sheet—More Facts: The State of the News Media, Pew Research Center (June 29, 2021), https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/.

The post-2000 consolidations accelerated a trend that began early in the 20th century. See Penelope Muse Abernathy, The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts 20-21 (2016), http://newspaperownership.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/07.UNC_RiseOfNewMediaBaron_SinglePage_01Sep2016-REDUCED.pdf.

See Penelope Muse Abernathy, The Expanding News Desert (2018), https://www.cislm.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-Expanding-News-Desert-10_14-Web.pdf;; Russell Baker, Goodbye to Newspapers?, N.Y. Rev. of Books (Aug. 16, 2007), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/08/16/goodbye-to-newspapers/ (describing slashing of news staff at various newspapers under new Wall Street owners).

See Elizabeth Grieco, Fast Facts About the Newspaper Industry's Financial Struggles as McClatchy Files for Bankruptcy, Pew Research Center (Feb. 14, 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/fast-facts-about-the-newspaper-industrys-financial-struggles/ (“Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers dropped by nearly half (47%) between 2008 and 2018.”); Mason Walker, U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Fallen 26% Since 2008, Pew Research Center (July 13, 2021), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-newsroom-employment-has-fallen-26-since-2008/ (“Newspaper newsroom employment fell 57% between 2008 and 2020 . . . .”).

Lara Takenaga, More Than 1 in 5 U.S. Papers Has Closed. This is the Result., N.Y. Times (Dec. 21, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/reader-center/local-news-deserts.html;; Penelope Muse Abernathy, The Expanding News Desert 12 (2018), https://www.cislm.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/The-Expanding-News-Desert-10_14-Web.pdf.

See Eric Alterman, Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper, New Yorker (Mar. 24, 2008), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/31/out-of-print (describing, among other things, the rise of Huffington Post and other news aggregators).

See Kimberley A. Isbell & Citizen Media Law Project, The Rise of the News Aggregator: Legal Implications and Best Practices (2010), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1670339.

Nic Newman, Richard Fletcher, Antonis Kalogeropoulos, David A.L. Levy & Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018 14 (2018), http://media.digitalnewsreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/digital-news-report-2018.pdf?x89475;; see also Doh-Shin Jeon, Economics of News Aggregators (Toulouse Sch. of Econ., Working Paper No. 18-912, 2018), https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/wp/2018/wp_tse_912.pdf;; Traffic Overview: news.google.com, similarweb, https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.google.com/#overview (last visited August 5, 2021) (showing that in 2021 Google News averages over 500 million visits per day). Among aggregating services, one of the trends of the last half decade has been the increasing dominance of the largest platforms and the decline of standalone aggregators. In recent years, Google and Facebook have continued to represent an outright majority of aggregator web traffic and referrals, while BuzzFeed, AOL, Yahoo and HuffPost have cut more than a thousand jobs, and smaller sites such as Gawker, Mic, Refinery29, the Outline, and PopSugar have shrunk, shuttered, or sold. Joshua Benton, Is Facebook Really A `News Powerhouse' Again, Thanks to Coronavirus? (No More Than It Was Before), NiemanLab (Mar. 24, 2020) https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/03/is-facebook-really-a-news-powerhouse-again-thanks-to-coronavirus-no-more-than-it-was-before/ (showing that over the twelve preceding months, Google and Facebook accounted for over 75% of outside referrals to news sites in the parse.ly network); Paul Farhi, “ Top Editors Leave HuffPost and BuzzFeed News Amid Growing Doubts About the Future of Digital News, Washington Post (Mar. 12, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/top-editors-leave-huffpost-and-buzzfeed-amid-growing-doubts-about-the-future-of-digital-news/2020/03/12/32cf09c0-6222-11ea-acca-80c22bbee96f_story.html.

See Eleonora Rosati, The German `Google Tax' Law: Groovy or Greedy? 8(7) J. Intel. Prop. L. & Prac. 497, 497 (2013); Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Juliana Sutanto, Mihai Calin & Elia Palme, Attention Allocation in Information-Rich Environments: The Case of News Aggregators, 62(9) Mgmt. Sci. 2543, 2543 (2015); Directive 2019/790, of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market and Amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC, 2019 O.J. (L 130) 92, 103-04, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj (“Publishers of press publications are facing problems in licensing the online use of their publications to the providers of those kinds of services, making it more difficult for them to recoup their investments.”).

See, e.g., Joan Calzada & Ricard Gil, What Do News Aggregators Do? Evidence from Google News in Spain and Germany 1-2 (2018), http://diposit.ub.edu/dspace/bitstream/2445/150425/1/695577.pdf;; Lisa M. George & Christiaan Hogendorn, Local News Online: Aggregators, Geo-Targeting and the Market for Local News, 68(4) J. Indus. Econ. 780, 804 (2020) (finding that a redesign of Google News adding geo-targeted local news links increased the level and share of local news consumption).

Doh-Shin Jeon, Economics of News Aggregators (Toulouse Sch. of Econ., Working Paper No. 18-912, 2018), https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/wp/2018/wp_tse_912.pdf (reviewing empirical literature and concluding that Google News and Facebook increase overall traffic to news sites); Kenny Olmstead, Amy Mitchell & Tom Rosenstiel, Navigating News Online: Where People Go, How They Get There and What Lures Them Away (2011), https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/legacy/NIELSEN-STUDY-Copy.pdf.

Kenny Olmstead, Amy Mitchell & Tom Rosenstiel, Navigating News Online: Where People Go, How They Got There, and What Lures Them Away 22 (2011), https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/legacy/NIELSEN-STUDY-Copy.pdf . (“According to the links users follow, Google News sends most users on to a news destination, but the range of those destinations is rather limited. Most of visitors to Google News . . . do click to a news story. According to the data, less than a third of news.google.com visitors headed to Google.com or another Google service. The remainder followed a link to a news site. But the benefactors are limited. Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%). Six additional sites were each the destination for 7-10% of visitors during the time period studied”).

See Doh-Shin Jeon, Economics of News Aggregators 18 (Toulouse Sch. of Econ., Working Paper No. 18-912, 2018), https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/wp/2018/wp_tse_912.pdf. ([“N]ews aggregators reduce traffic to newspaper home pages while increasing traffic to individual news articles. Even if all empirical articles agree on the statement that the business- stealing effect is dominated by the readership-expansion effect, if this comes with a reduced traffic to home pages, it can have a long-term consequence that is not captured by the empirical studies.”).

The Copyright Act defines “collective work” as a work “in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole.” 17 U.S.C. 101. Additionally, collective works under the Copyright Act are considered a type of compilation, which in turn is defined as “a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” 17. U.S.C. 101. The website of a daily newspaper, which assembles various discrete articles, photographs, and advertisements, could be an example of a copyrightable digital “collective work.”

“Work made for hire” is a category of works created for an employer or commissioning party, for which the individual(s) who create the work are not considered the author(s) and initial owner(s) for copyright purposes. Instead, the author is either (1) the employer of that individual, if the work is prepared within the scope of employment; or (2) the entity who commissions or orders the creation of the work, provided that the work fits within one of nine specific categories, and the parties expressly agree in a signed writing that “the work shall be considered a work made for hire.” 17 U.S.C. 101. Among these nine categories is “a contribution to a collective work,” meaning that a freelance article for a newspaper or magazine may constitute a work-made-for-hire, if the author and the publisher agreed to this in writing. 17 U.S.C. 101. In addition, any article written by an employee of a newspaper or magazine as part of their employment would clearly be a work-made-for-hire, with the publisher having the legal status of author (and copyright owner).

For freelance articles or photographs that are not works-made-for-hire, the author—in whom all exclusive rights initially vest—may transfer her rights to the publisher, either for a limited time or for the duration of the copyright, and the transfer may cover all or some of the exclusive rights. A transfer of rights may take the form of an assignment (meaning that legal title is transferred) or an exclusive license (meaning that exclusive permission to use the right(s) is transferred). See Minden Pictures, Inc. v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 795 F.3d 997, 1003 (9th Cir. 2015). For both types of transfers, the transferee gains the right to bring suit for infringement. See 3 Melvin B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright sec. 12.02[B][1] (2021). In contrast, if the parties only agree to a nonexclusive license—meaning that the author remains free to license the work to other parties—then the grantee cannot bring an infringement suit. See Minden Pictures, Inc. v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 795 F.3d 997, 1003 (9th Cir. 2015).

The relationship between the copyright in a collective work and in a particular contribution to a collective work is spelled out in the Copyright Act, which sets forth three instances where a publisher who does not own the copyright in an article may nonetheless reproduce and distribute it as part of: (1) “that particular collective work,” (2) “any revision of that collective work, and” (3) “any later collective work in the same series.” 17 U.S.C. 201(c). In the 2001 Tasini decision, the Supreme Court explicated section 201(c) as “adjust[ing] a publisher's copyright in its collective work to accommodate a freelancer's copyright in her contribution. If there is demand for a freelance article standing alone or in a new collection, the Copyright Act allows the freelancer to benefit from that demand; after authorizing initial publication, the freelancer may also sell the article to others.” N.Y. Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483, 497 (2001).

See 17 U.S.C. 106(1)-(5). As the Copyright Office has noted, these exclusive rights cover certain uses of copyrighted materials online, including the making available of copyrighted works for download or viewing via streaming. See generally U.S. Copyright Office, The Making Available Right in the United States (2016), https://www.copyright.gov/docs/making_available/making-available-right.pdf.

Similar, though not identical doctrines may be found in most countries' copyright laws. See, e.g., Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works art. 2(8), Sept. 9, 1886, as revised July 24, 1971, and as amended Sept. 28, 1979, S. Treaty Doc. No. 99-27, 1161 U.N.T.S. 3 (1986) (“Berne Convention”) (“The protection of this Convention shall not apply to news of the day or to miscellaneous facts having the character of mere items of press information.”); Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights art. 9(2), Apr. 15, 1994, Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, Annex 1C, 1869 U.N.T.S. 299 (1994), (“Copyright protection shall extend to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such.”); WIPO Copyright Treaty art. 2, Dec. 20, 1996, S. Treaty Doc. No. 105-17, 2186 U.N.T.S. 121 (“Copyright protection extends to expressions and not to ideas, procedures, methods of operation or mathematical concepts as such.”).

17 U.S.C. 102(b) (“In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.”); Feist Publ'ns, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340, 345 (1991); see also Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. 99, 103 (1880) (describing idea/expression dichotomy).

CMM Cable Rep., Inc. v. Ocean Coast Props., Inc., 97 F.3d 1504, 1519-20 (1st Cir. 1996) (titles and short phrases uncopyrightable); Aryelo v. Am. Int'l Ins. Co., No. 95-1360, 1995 WL 561530 at *1 (1st Cir. Sept. 21, 1995) (per curiam, table, unpublished) (“The non-copyrightability of titles in particular has been authoritatively established”); 37 CFR 202.1(a) (excluding from copyright protection “[w]ords and short phrases such as name, titles, and slogans”).

N.Y. Mercantile Exch., Inc. v. IntercontinentalExchange, Inc., 497 F.3d 109, 116-17 (2d Cir. 2007); 4 Melvin B. Nimmer & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright sec. 13.03[B][3] (explaining that “courts have invoked the doctrine of merger ” where “rigorously protecting the expression would confer a monopoly over the idea itself, in contravention of the statutory command”).

See, e.g., Swatch Grp. Mgmt. Servs. Ltd. v. Bloomberg L.P., 756 F.3d 73, 84 (2d Cir. 2014) (explaining that fair use often, though not always, supports direct quotation of copyrighted works in news reporting context); Nunez v. Caribbean Int'l News Corp., 235 F.3d 18, 22-23 (1st Cir. 2000) (finding newspaper's use of copyrighted photographs was fair where the photographs themselves were the news story).

See, e.g., Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., 336 F.3d 811, 818 (9th Cir. 2003) (finding defendant's reproduction of thumbnails of plaintiff's photographs in defendant's search engine results was transformative); Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. 508 F.3d 1146, 1165 (9th Cir. 2007) (same); cf. Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., 804 F.3d 202, 229 (2d Cir. 2015) (finding Google's unauthorized display of snippets of copyrighted works as part of a searchable index was fair use).

Fox News Network, LLC v. TVEyes, Inc, 883 F.3d 169, 180-81 (2d Cir. 2018); see also MidlevelU, Inc. v. ACI Information Grp., 989 F.3d 1205, 1222-23 (11th Cir. 2021) (denying judgment as a matter of law on fair use defense where aggregated index of blog content also allowed users to view full text of articles without navigating to the original source); Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc., 931 F. Supp. 2d 537, 545 (S.D.N.Y. 2013) (finding news monitoring service's reproduction and distribution of excerpts of online news articles was not fair use). Cf. Video Pipeline, Inc. v. Buena Vista Home Entmt., 342 F.3d 191, 200 (3d Cir. 2003) (rejecting fair use defense of a service that compiled movie clips into a commercial database of movie trailers).

See, e.g., Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Keach Hagey, Google to Pay News Corp for Access to Its Publications' Content, Wall Street J. (Feb. 17, 2021), https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-pay-news-corp-for-access-to-its-publications-content-11613592397 (reporting three-year licensing deal between Google and News Corp.); Benjamin Mullin and Sahil Patel, Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year to License Content, Wall Street J. (Aug. 8, 2019), https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-offers-news-outlets-millions-of-dollars-a-year-to-license-content-11565294575 (reporting that Facebook was seeking licenses from news outlets for proposed news section).

248 U.S. 215 (1918).

Int'l News Serv. v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 230-31 (1918).

See United States Copyright Office, Report on Legal Protections for Databases 82 (1997), https://www.copyright.gov/reports/db4.pdf (noting abrogation of federal common law generally by the Supreme Court in Erie R.R. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 78 (1938)).

See Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919); Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919).

105 F.2d 841, 845 (2d Cir. 1997) (limiting hot news claims to cases where: “(i) a plaintiff generates or gathers information at a cost; (ii) the information is time-sensitive; (iii) a defendant's use of the information constitutes free-riding on the plaintiff's efforts; (iv) the defendant is in direct competition with a product or service offered by the plaintiffs; and (v) the ability of other parties to free-ride on the efforts of the plaintiff or others would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.”); see also id. at 853 (explaining that the “extra elements” needed for a hot news claim to survive preemption are “(i) the time-sensitive value of factual information, (ii) the free-riding by a defendant, and (iii) the threat to the very existence of the product or service provided by the plaintiff”).

See, e.g., Brantley v. Epic Games, Inc., 463 F. Supp.3d 616, 626 (D. Md. 2020); IPOX Schuster, LLC v. Nikko Asset Mgmt. Co., 304 F. Supp. 3d 746, 757 (N.D. Ill. 2018); Thousand Oaks Barrel Co. v. Deep S. Barrels LLC, 241 F. Supp. 3d 708, 725 (E.D. Va. 2017) (holding Virginia does not recognize the tort of hot news misappropriation); Scrappost, LLC v. Peony Online, Inc., No. 14-14761, 2017 WL 697028, at *8 (E.D. Mich. Feb. 22, 2017); World Chess US, Inc. v. Chessgames Servs. LLC, No. 16 CIV. 8629 (VM), 2016 WL 7190075, at *4 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 22, 2016); Ste. Genevieve Media, LLC v. Pulitzer Mo. Newspapers, Inc., No. 1:16 CV 87 ACL, 2016 WL 6083796, at *5 (E.D. Mo. Oct. 18, 2016). But see Dow Jones & Co. v. Real-Time Analysis & News, Ltd., No. 14-CV-131 (JMF)(GWG), 2014 WL 4629967, at *7 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 15, 2014), report and recommendation adopted, No. 14-CV-131 (JMF)(GWG), 2014 WL 5002092 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 7, 2014) (granting damages on plaintiff's hot news misappropriation claim).

650 F.3d 876, 902 (2d Cir. 2011). Applying the NBA v. Motorola factors, the court found: (i) The recommendations were works of authorship within the general subject-matter of the Copyright Act; (ii) plaintiff's alleged “hot news” right in the recommendations could be violated by copying and distribution that, on their own, would violate the Copyright Act; and (iii) there was no evidence that the defendants were “free-riding” in the sense previously recognized in hot news cases. Id.

Directive 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market and Amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC, 2019 O.J. (L 130) 92, 92-125, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj. An “ancillary” or “neighboring” right is one that does not belong to the author of the copyrighted work. See Meghan Sali, What the Heck is Ancillary Copyright and Why Do We Call it the Link Tax?, Open Media (May 5, 2016), https://openmedia.org/article/item/what-heck-ancillary-copyright-and-why-do-we-call-it-link-tax. In this case, the term “ancillary copyright” arises because press publishers are not the authors of the news materials at issue, but will nonetheless have the right to authorize or prohibit certain uses of the materials.

See European Parliament, Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs, Strengthening the Position of Press Publishers and Authors and Performers in the Copyright Directive 14 (2017) (providing an English translation of the German press publisher statute), https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/9f45daff-c437-11e7-9b01-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-206447220. The law covered snippets, but did not apply to individual words or “very short text excerpts,” or mere linking. In 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled the law was unenforceable for procedural reasons. See Jan Bernd Nordemann & Stefanie Jehle (Nordemann), VG Media/Google: German Press Publishers' Right Declared Unenforceable by the CJEU for Formal Reasons—But It Will Soon Be Re-born, Kluwer Copyright Blog (Nov. 11, 2019), http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2019/11/11/vg-media-google-german-press-publishers-right-declared-unenforceable-by-the-cjeu-for-formal-reasons-but-it-will-soon-be-re-born/.

See Raquel Xalabarder, The Remunerated Statutory Limitation for News Aggregation and Search Engines Proposed by the Spanish Government: Its Compliance with International and EU Law (2014), infojustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/xalabarder.pdf. In response to the law, Google shut down Google News in Spain. Eric Auchard, Google to Shut Down News Site in Spain Over Copyright Fees, Reuters (Dec. 11, 2014), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-spain-news/google-to-shut-down-news-site-in-spain-over-copyright-fees-idUSKBN0JP0QM20141211 . Both the law and Google News's shutdown in Spain persist.

See Directive 2019/790, of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market and Amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC, art. 15(4), 2019 O.J. (L 130) 92, 92-125, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj.

See Directive 2019/790, of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market and Amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC, art. 15(1-4), 2019 O.J. (L 130) 92-125, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj.

Directive 2019/790, of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market and Amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC, 2019 O.J. (L 130) 92, 104, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj.

See European Commission, Public Consultation on the Role of Publishers in the Copyright Value Chain and on the `Panorama Exception', European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/Consultation_Copyright?surveylanguage=EN#page1 (last visited Aug. 11, 2021).

See DSM Directive Implementation Tracker, Communia (last visited July 28, 2021), https://www.notion.so/DSM-Directive-Implementation-Tracker-361cfae48e814440b353b32692bba879. Italy has adopted a “delegation law” implementing the CDSM. As noted above, Spain has a press publisher's law that predates, but is in some respects inconsistent with, Article 15 of the CDSM. French law requires news aggregators to share with publishers data on how readers use the reproduced press material. Loi 2019-775 du 24 juillet 2019 tendant à créer un droit voisin au profit des agences de presse et des éditeurs de presse [Law 2019-775 of July 24, 2019 on the Creation of Neighboring Rights for the Benefit of Press Agencies and Publishers], Journal Officiel de la République Française [J.O.][Official Gazette of France], July 26, 2019; Diana Passinke, An Analysis of Articles 15 and 17 of the EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market: A Boost for the Creative Industries or the Death of the internet? (Stanford-Vienna Eur. Union L. Working Paper No. 49, 2020), http://ttlf.stanford.edu. These laws have continued to provoke controversy. Shortly before France's implementing law became effective, Google announced that it would no longer display snippets of results from European press publishers as part of search results in France, unless a publisher opts in to the display free of charge. French press publisher unions sued Google, and France's competition authority declared that Google would have to negotiate remuneration to press publishers in good faith. See Natasha Lomas, France's Competition Watchdog Orders Google to Pay for News Reuse, TechCrunch (Apr. 9, 2020), https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/09/frances-competition-watchdog-orders-google-to-pay-for-news-reuse/. Google has since signed contracts with several French publishers. See Tom Hirche, Google Signs Contracts with a Handful of French Publishers, IGEL (Nov. 24, 2020), https://ancillarycopyright.eu/news/2020-11-24/google-signs-contracts-handful-french-press-publishers. In July of 2021, France's competition authority fined Google over $500 million for failure to negotiate in good faith. See Associated Press, France Fines Google $592M in a Dispute Over Paying News Publishers for Content, NPR (Jul. 13, 2021), https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015596060/france-fines-google-592m-in-a-dispute-over-paying-news-publishers-for-content.

See Most EU Countries Not Enacting Copyright Laws, Portugal News (Jul. 26, 2021), https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2021-07-26/most-eu-countries-not-enacting-new-copyright-laws/61315.

For example, in the United States, the proposed Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021 would create a four-year safe harbor from antitrust laws for print, broadcast, or digital news companies to collectively negotiate with online content distributors. S. 673, 117th Cong. sec. 2 (2021).

Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021 (Cth) (Austl.), https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r6652_aspassed/toc_pdf/20177b01.pdf. The law also included a set of minimum standards for providing advance notice of changes to algorithmic ranking and presentation of news.

Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021 (Cth) (Austl.), https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r6652_aspassed/toc_pdf/20177b01.pdf.

Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021 (Cth) (Austl.), https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r6652_aspassed/toc_pdf/20177b01.pdf.

Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021 (Cth) (Austl.), https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r6652_aspassed/toc_pdf/20177b01.pdf.

Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2021 (Cth) (Austl.), https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/r6652_aspassed/toc_pdf/20177b01.pdf. Opponents of Australia's approach, including Google, have argued that it rests on a misunderstanding of the economic forces affecting press publishers and undermines the “principle of unrestricted linking between websites.” 50. Mel Silva, Mel Silva's Opening Statement to the Senate Economics Committee Inquiry, Google: The Keyeword (Jan. 22, 2021), https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/australia/mel-silvas-opening-statement/ . Facebook initially protested the law by blocking news sharing in Australia, but restored service after Australia amended the law to include a two-month mediation period and to accommodate pre-existing deals between Facebook and news publishers. Elizabeth Dwoskin, Facebook, Australia Reach Deal to Restore News Pages After Shutdown, Wash. Post (Feb. 23, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/22/facebook-news-australia-deal/;;; see also Kelly Buchanan, Australia: New Legislation Establishes Code of Conduct for Negotiations between News Media and Digital Platforms over Payments for Content, Libr. Congress: Global Legal Monitor (Feb. 26, 2021), https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/australia-new-legislation-establishes-code-of-conduct-for-negotiations-between-news-media-and-digital-platforms-over-payments-for-content/.