Neighbouring rights

EU's nod could alter how news is consumed

In response to an appeal by nine major European news agencies, the European Union is debating the extension of an existing copyright provision called “neighbouring rights”. This would give the agencies leverage to negotiate with Facebook, Google, Twitter and other such online news aggregators for payment for the millions of news articles they feature, or provide links to, on their platforms. If this goes through, it will change the current revenue model for news consumption and, perhaps, for other content as well. 

The agencies point out that Google and Facebook do not have newsrooms. Nor do they bear the expenses of