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1. Embed this notice
   Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 04:35:14 JST Chris Trottier

   Meta is threatening Canadians.

   They will make news inaccessible on Facebook and Instagram if the Online News Act passes. The reason: the law will compel Meta to compensate Canadian journalists when their content is repurposed on those platforms.

   Well, I hope they follow through on their threat!

   For too long, Meta and Twitter have got rich off the hard work of journalists while paying peanuts.

   https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/meta-block-news-liberal-online-bill-1.6776485

   • Fediverse Report repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Mike McCue (mike@flipboard.social)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 04:35:13 JST Mike McCue

     in reply to

     • Mike Masnick ✅

     @atomicpoet Laws like this can have significant unintended consequences and tend to hurt the smaller players more than the big ones. Are there any lawyers/policy makers out there who know whether this could hamper link sharing across fediverse instances? For example, will Canadian instance owners have to pay publishers for links that point to publisher content? Is there a cutoff in terms of size of audience? If not, there probably should be. @mmasnick what do you think?

   • Embed this notice
     Fediverse Report (fediversereport@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 04:57:55 JST Fediverse Report

     in reply to

     • Mike Masnick ✅
     • Mike McCue

     @mike @atomicpoet @mmasnick Now this got me curious too, so I looked up the definition of Digital Platform that the Online News Act uses.

     It focuses on power inbalance and bargaining power. By a common definition reading it feels like fediverse servers would not fall under that, but I´m extremely not an expert on canadian law.

     https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/corporate/transparency/open-government/standing-committee/pablo-rodriguez-bill-c18/questions-answers.html

   • Embed this notice
     Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 04:57:56 JST Chris Trottier

     in reply to

     • Mike Masnick ✅
     • Mike McCue

     @mike @mmasnick My own standpoint is that social media platforms need to decide whether they are a utility or a publisher.

     If they're a utility, they have no business editorializing or "repurposing" news. Present the news with full transparency.

     If they're a publisher, then pay up!

     But as it stands, Meta is trying to be a publisher while presenting themselves as a utility.

   • Embed this notice
     Mike McCue (mike@flipboard.social)'s status on Tuesday, 14-Mar-2023 04:57:56 JST Mike McCue

     in reply to

     • Mike Masnick ✅

     @atomicpoet @mmasnick will be interesting to see who/how that is determined legally. For example, if @sfba.social posts a link to a local news story are they now a publisher? Who decides? And further, if there's a risk of falling into the publisher category, does that scare away instance owners from linking to content?

     Oh and btw, is this limited to media cos only? What about individuals who create video, blog posts, podcasts or for that matter individuals who create interesting threads?