The California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) is the latest in a long line of efforts by the news industry — lobbying legislators in many countries — to extend copyright and diminish fair use for the exclusive benefit of news publishers and producers. The CJPA’s stated intent is to address the deepening economic crisis in California’s news industry by requiring large online platforms to pay a “journalism usage fee” for linking to news.

This paper will address a number of questions and issues relating to the legislation’s likely impact and unintended consequences, its basis in law, and its economic presumptions. It will examine lessons from the history of other news-industry crises in the past. The paper will review the state of the news ecosystem in California and its history. It will then offer many alternative methods to support the news and information providers in the state.

CJPA follows a number of similar efforts to establish what is known as an “ancillary copyright,” starting in Germany in 2012, spreading to Spain and the rest of the European Union and then to Australia, and Canada. In Canada, while Google agreed to pay C$100 million ($73 million) to publishers, Meta dropped all news content, links, and payment from Facebook and Instagram, leaving news providers arguably worse off than before the legislation.

For context, this paper will examine the history of news and its relation to copyright, of the newspaper industry’s reception of new technologies and competitors, and of California’s newspaper industry and its long trend of consolidation. History reveals clear patterns being played out again today in regards to search engines and social media and most recently artificial intelligence: The newspaper industry has tried since the advent of radio to expand copyright beyond its intended bounds; the newspaper industry has accused competitors of antitrust or sought its own exemptions from it; news media have often used their influence to claim that new competitors are bad for news or democracy; and newspapers have often lobbied for protectionist legislation and regulation to disadvantage newcomers in their field.