My understanding was that the complaints was against using larger excerpts. I haven't used neither Googles nor Metas offerings, but the objection that I read in a different article was about users reading the news on Facebook, rather than letting the users click through to the newspapers.

If Google and Meta just generate free traffic for the news site, then I'm not really sure why they're complaining. If their write is straight up reproduced without permission then I understand.

When I visit https://news.google.com I only see very short excerpts like "Supreme Court Rejects Affirmative Action at U.S. Colleges".

My interpretation is that Google/Meta do only reproduce short excerpts, however short excerpts is all many people ever read. If those excerpts satisfy people’s interests, then they never end up visiting the actual new sites.

Even on HN it’s not uncommon to see people commenting on articles they’ve only read the title of.

> they never end up visiting the actual news sites.

I don't understand anyone who just visits a general news site and reads arbitrary articles. I understand with physical newspapers, because they deliver it to your house in the morning and there was no alternative but to subscribe to multiple papers. I have to think that only senior citizens do it now. I only pay for outlets because I want them to be healthy and to continue publishing, and I don't personally care about some major city's establishment paper, and don't care whether it shuts down.

Will news stories that are just rewrites of other news stories pay the original now?

> And isn't showing the content of the RSS feed "fair use" anyhow?

Fair use and copyright are 'artificial' legal constructs, so if they were defined in an 'arbitrary' way to begin with, they can be redefined to add or remove provisions. These online publishing laws could tweak those provisions.

Also: when an RSS/Atom feed is published, it is still copyrighted, and the terms and conditions would/could perhaps be defined what "fair use" is by copyright holder (maybe?).

Sure, laws are human constructs.

But what is the situation in Canada now? Did they really put a law into place which says "When you link to a page with a short excerpt to show what the link is about, this is now a copyright violation"?

Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?

> Wouldn't that also make search engines illegal?

Seems like yes. From the article:

"The tech giant plans to remove news links from its search engine, Google News and Google Discover for only Canadian publishers and readers."

Seems like this will be much worse for the media companies. It isn't like most people who clicked on news while casually scrolling their feed are suddenly going to start going to all these news sites direct.