LAST week, social media giant Facebook struck back against a new Australian law that would require it and other internet platforms such as Google to pay for Australian media content published and shared on their sites. In a move apparently intended to bully the Australian government into backing down, Facebook abruptly blocked all Australian news content, in the process also cutting off some non-media government, institutional and commercial information pages.

As a media organization, we must acknowledge that there is a beneficial rationale from Australia’s position and that Facebook’s contention that it should not have to pay for media content amounts to claiming the right to practice piracy. Producers of media content must be paid fairly for the publication or republication of their product. Sharing an article on Facebook is not fundamentally different from one newspaper’s reprinting another newspaper’s copyrighted story; it cannot be done without the copyright holder’s permission and, as this is a commercial business, that permission usually has a price tag attached.