“performs a public information function comparable to that traditionally served by newspapers and other periodical news publications.” What publications don’t serve that function?.“provide information to an audience in the state.” Is a single reader in California an “audience”? By mandating royalty payouts despite limited ties to California, the bill ensures that many/most DJPs will not be California-based or have any interest in California-focused journalism.Who is a Digital Journalism Provider (DJP)?Ī print publisher qualifies as a DJP if it: We should encourage journalists to build sustainable business models. Worse, journalist operations may become dependent on the platforms’ royalties, which could dry up with little warning (e.g., a platform could drop below CJPA’s statutory threshold). Recall how the COVID stimulus programs directly led to massive stock buybacks that put the government’s cash into the hands of already-wealthy stockholders-same thing here. With the influx of new cash, DJPs can divert their current spending on journalists and overhead into the owners’ pockets. The bill explicitly permits the money to be spent on administrative overhead instead of actual journalism. “Arbitrator” is another misnomer the so-called arbitrators are just setting valuations.ĭJPs must spend 70% of their royalty payouts on “news journalists and support staff,” but that money won’t necessarily fund NEW INCREMENTAL journalism. The bill contemplates that the royalty amounts will be set by an “arbitrator” who will apply baseball-style “arbitration,” i.e., the valuation expert picks one of the parties’ proposals. The wealth-transfer recipients are called “digital journalism providers” (DJPs). The platforms aren’t allowed to reject or hide DJPs’ content, so they must show the content to their audiences and pay royalties even if they don’t want to. In an effort to justify this compelled wealth transfer, the bill manufactures a new intellectual property right-sometimes called an “ ancillary copyright for press publishers“-in snippets and links and then requires the platforms to pay royalties (euphemistically called “journalism usage fee payments”) for the “privilege” of publishing ancillary-copyrighted material. CJPA would compel some bigger online publishers (called “covered platforms” in the bill) to transfer some of their wealth directly to other publishers-intended to be journalistic operations, but most of the dollars will go to vulture capitalists’ stockholders and MAGA-clickbait outlets like Breitbart. Instead, it pursues a policy worse than socialism. The CJPA bypasses the government’s intermediation and supervision of these cash flows. Tax dollars go to the government, which can then allocate the money to (in theory) advance the public good-such as funding journalism. This policy approach is sometimes called a “link tax,” but that’s a misnomer. The CJPA would make some Big Tech services pay journalists for using snippets of their content and providing links to the journalists’ websites. Sadly, the California Assembly failed that test. The CJPA isn’t a referendum on the importance of journalism instead, it’s a test of our legislators’ skills at problem-solving, drafting, and helping constituents. Instead, the CJPA takes an asinine, ineffective, unconstitutional, and industry-captured approach to this critical topic. Quality local journalism is key to sustaining civic society, strengthening communal ties, and providing information at a deeper level that national outlets cannot match.” Given these stakes, politicians should prioritize developing good-faith and well-researched ways to facilitate and support journalism. The CJPA engages with a critical problem in our society: how to ensure the production of socially valuable journalism in the face of the Internet’s changes to journalists’ business models? The bill declares, and I agree, that a “free and diverse fourth estate was critical in the founding of our democracy and continues to be the lifeblood for a functioning democracy…. CJPA has passed the California Assembly and is pending in the California Senate. California’s latest entry into this Internet death-spiral is the California Journalism Protection Act (CJPA, AB 886). The California legislature is competing with states like Florida and Texas to see who can pass laws that will be more devastating to the Internet. Mon, Jun 26th 2023 11:55am - Eric Goldman
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |