It’s all happening in Australia.

Our government wants companies like Google and Facebook to pay news creators for having their articles appear in search results or when they are shared on a social media feed.

Google is negotiating with them while Facebook said “fuck you” and blocked or restricted all news content on the platform.

The thing is, these news outlets have never adapted to the changing marketplace that the World Wide Web brings.

They put content behind paywalls and it’s not working as good as the news content providers hoped it would do. Physical sales are down.

They have articles on the site with a lot of ads running on the side. Most of the article’s that generate money from ads are click bait stories and not the proper well researched long form articles.

So if you’re a serious journalist, there is a very high chance that your well written story that takes 15 minutes to read will be ignored because click bait short stories end up rising to the top.

And it’s all in the name of copyright.

Copyright allows the news creators to say to Google or Facebook that these companies are using copyrighted material without permission or proper compensation on their services.

And if you are in doubt as to how much power copyright has, look no further than the Beverley Hills Police Officers.

The officers are playing copyrighted music at each arrest and stop, so if they are filmed and that video is shared, they are using copyrights take down tool to remove the videos on copyright grounds.

Remember that the intention of copyright is to give the creator a short term monopoly on their art so they could make money from it.

And then once that term expired, the art enters the public domain so future generations can use it to create.

Add enforcement to it.