I agree, and also think it's very easily worked around in a way that is detrimental to publishers.
If I were in the shoes of a Google News product manager, my take would be, "Fine, I won't show your snippets then." I'd show a summary and then headline links to the various news sources. (Or if that's too much for the law, just links with the title of the paper.)
The number of news stories is small enough that the bulk of summaries could be quickly written by humans. But I suspect Google has enough ML magic that they can easily generate adequate summaries for most articles, with a small team of humans that reviews and improves prominent ones.
This would be just as good from the consumer perspective, and it's another opportunity for Google to build up a data-driven moat. But from the newspaper perspective, they lose out: anything that makes their voice unique or distinctive will get squeezed out. It would further commodify news, which is the last thing newspapers want.
If I were in the shoes of a Google News product manager, my take would be, "Fine, I won't show your snippets then." I'd show a summary and then headline links to the various news sources. (Or if that's too much for the law, just links with the title of the paper.)
The number of news stories is small enough that the bulk of summaries could be quickly written by humans. But I suspect Google has enough ML magic that they can easily generate adequate summaries for most articles, with a small team of humans that reviews and improves prominent ones.
This would be just as good from the consumer perspective, and it's another opportunity for Google to build up a data-driven moat. But from the newspaper perspective, they lose out: anything that makes their voice unique or distinctive will get squeezed out. It would further commodify news, which is the last thing newspapers want.