"How is it that the creators of news, knowing full well they have legal copyright protection under the U.S. Copyright Act, have allowed the digital platforms to gain such power?"
In a guest column published in the Tampa Bay Times, John Chachas, founder and a managing partner of Methuselah Advisors, says the "immense reach of Google’s search engine, the dominance of Facebook’s 1.5 billion social media subscribers, and the prolific growth of Twitter’s consumer broadcast platform occurred under the watch of enterprise journalism."
He says: "Google, Facebook and Twitter must acknowledge that their billions of daily users benefit from access to edited, fact-checked, and verified local information. These platforms, directly and indirectly, earn what some estimate could be $10 billion annually from their access to this 'free' content. Sorry, it isn’t free. It is being stolen. It is long past time the American publishers were paid a fair and appropriate license payment for access to their product."
