The European Commission is preparing an attack on the hyperlink
juliareda.eu
juliareda.eu
Not only does technology advance much faster than law, but law makers are almost by definition two generations behind the generation that actually is native to the technological change in question. It's not possible to win in that situation.
You're asking someone whose paradigm of video was formed by the advent of color TV, to understand the cultural and technological consequences of popcorn time. It's like the tech problems of WWI: generals who only knew cavalry rushes continued ordering i calvary rushes, even against machine gun fire and even against staggering numbers of dead.
So I think I give up now. Technological issues may as well ignore the legal framework, because the legal framework ignores the technological issues. If we stop fighting, the rules will get so ridiculous as to he openly impossible to satisfy, offering industries the choice to either ignore them, or go out of business. In the end this stuff doesn't strangle the open sourcers or the hacker culture... It only strangles big industry, the people pay the legislators' paychecks. So fuck em. Legislators can figure it out when it hits their tax receipts.
So even in Panama your opinions are "sorry you're in the EU I can't sell to you" or you're supposed to collect the VAT. At present I don't believe they have tried to enforce it through any court yet. So I'm unsure how that would play out.
Laws are tools paid for and created by large entities to cement their positions. Ignoring laws means giving ridiculously powerful legal tools to big companies and governments to prosecute the smaller groups who can't defend themselves.
IANAL, so my understanding is naive (at best): law is about striking a balance.
So long as technological progress continues to rearrange society, it'll be a while before things settle down, thereby giving people sufficient time and experience figure out a new acceptable balance.
I probably misremember (or just made up) this factoid: It took Roman's 400 years to codify their laws. So I think we're doing pretty good.
To all the comments speaking to the shortcomings of their legislators and how those shortcomings translate to suboptimal or even outright harmful laws, please consider two other options. Direct democracy and laissez-faire /libertarianism /anarchy.
First, consider direct democracy. By opening the legislative process to every eligible citizen, there is little chance the voting base will become more knowledgeable as to the issues of technology it will be voting on. It will in all probability become less knowledgeable, on par. Direct democracy increases the cognitive load on the legislator by orders of magnitude. By not having professional legislators each citizen must become, in addition to already being a productive member of the work force keeping their skills sharp and keeping abreast of advancements in their field, being a responsible, good member of their social circles, oh, and having a personal life, they must now both make decisions as to when they should devote resources to their legislative duties, given there will always be something up for vote, they must also devote resources deciding how they will vote. So, direct democracy not only creates a larger pool of non expert technology legislators but it also creates a framework in which those new legislators are less capable to devote the appropriate resources to legislate effectively.
Now consider the laissez-faire case. This one is easy, and for a contemporary case study one just needs to look at the recently drafted TPP language on restrictions on States regarding OSS. Laissez-faire simply settles in whatever state is conducive to the capabilities and sensibilities of the most fit entity given the initial state of the environment and its constituents. If the environment is most conducive to an entity which is benevolent and intelligent, awesome. If it is conducive to the successful outcome of a self interested, profit motive driven entity, awesome or not, that is the outcome in that case. It is amoral. No judgement. Just outcome.
The case for representative democracy then follows rather nicely, for once. Representative democracy creates a specialized space for crafting legislation where the citizens concerned about a given piece of legislation can appeal to the legislators to devote more resources to that particular issue, over other issues. Additionally they can provide additional resources to the legislators on a case by case basis to help them legislate, which may come in the form of financial assistance, access to relevant case or field studies, or experts in the domain. The non legislative citizens can then still go on about their lives, and the legislators can craft better quality legislation. Lobbying would be a form of this activity, but one in which the non legislative party is already decided as to how the legislation should look in its finished form, rather than simply trying to inform better legislation.
Two other benefits of representative democracy. The process inserts safety-switches in the form of, for example, checks and balances (only possible when the legislature is split in to different bodies, does not work when the whole legisture is involved in every part of the process), vetoes and recalls (same thing here), or the formalized process itself, which might require drafting, review, certification, or cooling-off/reflection periods.
All of which I mention to say that, sure, our "legislators" proper have had some pretty dumb moments recently while discharging their duties, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. They are only a small part of our law making apparatus. Lobbyists have certainly been providing their full energy. The process itself, while never perfect, has certainly done well for its constituents over an extended historical period, especially compared to other experiments; part of the beauty of the currently implemented process is its ability to improve and broaden the scope of its constituency, which should certainly continue. And there are some examples of grass roots activity influencing the dialogue and end-product.
As technology experts, throwing our support and resources behind the entire process, in a holistic fashion, providing expertise, opening up operations to legislators and citizens so they can familiarize themselves with often mysterious domains, providing a forumn for dialogues surrounding the issues, etc, this, to me at least, seems like a promising way forward, as opposed to withdrawing from the process all together and assuming everthing will sort itself out to one's personal liking. Not every issue will be settled in a manner that will satisfy each citizen every time. But that is the trade off one makes for being part of a larger community which shares most, but not necessarily each of their interests and priorities with the other members of their community. On balance though, we should all be better off if everyone engages and basic rights are respected.
So, yeah, call you Senator or Representative today. :)
IMO, direct democracy to throw out laws and to also get the government to NOT do something (ie: invade a country) I'm in favor for. Though, direct democracy to vote through laws would require stronger restrictions (the law has to be drafted by elected politicians, for example).
But we do need some form of direct democracy because politicians are easily paid for and certainly don't represent the population (at least, here, in the UK).
Currency was likely directly created as tax payments. There are several examples where some unit of currency was basicly X food for Y time.
"It only strangles big industry..."
No, big industry will say how they would prefer this to roll. Currently the publishing houses seem to hold the upper hand. Industry players percieve this as a way to funnel Google and Facebook profits to dying industries in europe. Instead of innovating the publishing houses fight death through supportive legislation.
The largest example of this however was away from the battlefield. As Napoleon Bonaparte said "An army runs on its stomach", and the explosion of modern military logistics that took place in WWI was nothing short of miraculous. Millions of men, food, supplies, armaments, had to be shuffled back and forth from France, to Russia, and back to France again, in ways that had never been conceived before.
One reason I believe this rapid advancement was possible was because leaders were CONSTANTLY replaced if their performance suffered. This forced new, and occasionally younger (but mostly old), officers to adapt or quickly lose their rank.
I think this yields some hope in modern times, we don't necessarily need better representatives, just new ones, constantly, until they get it right.
And not only that, but the bulk of it was still being done with horse and carriages.
This 1 min video clip from a UK comedy show is over 30 years old. But it captures this sentiment perfectly
Actually, you have it exactly backwards. Big corporation have teams of lawyers that will allow them to navigate this legal thicket. But your average open-source project, or blog? The first scary legal letter they get, asking for a six-to-seven figure amount for copyright infringement, will cause them to shut down. As far as I can tell, this law is a huge threat to any free-speech that threatens corporate interests, because the moment you link to the thing you're criticizing, you can be sued for thousands to millions, depending on how many people (allegedly) clicked.
Under this legal regime, making it to the front page of Hacker News would be a literal kiss of death to almost organization that offends corporate interests. Maybe the EFF could handle the legal wrangling to prove that its links were "fair use", or whatever. Precious few others would be able to.
Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it seems to me that under this legal regime, an organization that offends corporate interests making it to the front page of HN would be the kiss of death to HN. The danger is that the mere act of linking to something controversial becomes guilt by association, and since in general someone who links to another site doesn't control the content on that other site, anyone can become guilty of whatever crimes result literally without having done anything wrong (beyond not constantly legally reviewing the content of every site they link to and removing links in real time in the event of any potential problem).
Your point, however, is a good one. This legal framework would kill off Reddit, Hacker News, and all the other link aggregators out there. If linking to copyrighted material without permission counts as copyright infringement, then linking to anything, anywhere becomes a very dangerous act. It'd probably also hurt Twitter and Facebook badly (no more linking to viral videos or funny images).
I say, let them die. Most newspapers are a joke. I don't subscribe to them because it's actually a way to become misinformed about any specific topic. Or at least that's what I see in their take of any topic I know profoundly.
There are alternatives. Reader-supported news like LWN seem to be working. I get most of my content from topic specific websites, blogs, and mail lists.
About the classified ads. Why is that a problem at all?
"Maybe Google will only accept an European provision, accept European instruments because then, if needed, via the competition law and the European Commissioner for Competition measures, penalties and legal action in case of breach of European rules are possible"
Transcription -> Steal.
As an EU citizen, it's mind-boggling to see the sheer stupidity of our politicians in the past 2-3 years...
I'm still waiting when they suggest that airline pilots can be replaced with bus drivers to stop them going on strike / industrial action - it's called an Airbus so there shouldn't be much difference, after all it has bus in the name.
And he never said anything good. He was one of the worst minister of the state i'm living in. Clearly only one guy after him was worse.
He is totally stupid and he and his successor managed it that people started to vote other parties on state votes, after over 50 years the CDU dropped out of the state cabinet.
And now here is the fun fact. Most german politicians inside the EU are politicians nobody wanted in the foreign country. The problem is even if they do completely bad things these politics never needed to fear about any judges against them.
That's funny, it's exactly the same, here, in France!
They get lots of money, and you get rid of them. Sure, the Council pretty much agree with all commission proposed laws anyway, so the only risk is a media one.
As a citizen of an EU state I can't help but feel that we are here governed by complete morons.
Their incentives are mostly toward over-regulating. If they over-regulate, they mainly harm invisible potential improvements. Whereas if they under-regulate, the big, obvious failures mean they get in a lot of hot water.
It is nothing more than a counter tax avoidance measure.
As far as I know, they don't force minimum tax rates - that's a freedom of a member state. That's also why you pay 33% corporate tax in Belgium and 5% in Malta.
Unfortunately, it is something more than a counter tax avoidance measure, because it has caused vast collateral damage. It's a huge administrative burden that literally makes many micro-businesses unviable, and it imposes prohibitive overheads on slightly larger businesses that are just getting going.
To add insult to injury, it's also impossible in practice to comply with the rules fully even if you make a good faith effort, unless you have a specialist VAT accountant's level understanding of each EU member state's tax system. Obviously no business except for large multinationals actually has this level of understanding available to it.
What is particularly appalling in this case is that the authorities who spent all that time working on the new rules didn't even realise all those smaller businesses existed until the very end. A huge campaign against the new measures was started with just weeks to go. Most of the authorities across all levels of government pointed to years of discussions, said they consulted earlier, and asked why the small businesses didn't say anything before. It didn't even occur to them that the microbusinesses didn't know, because no-one had thought to contact them, unlike larger businesses with well-established VAT management, and because someone running a £500/year side business from their kitchen table to fund their kids' christmas presents might not be following the intricate details of EU tax negotiations.
The icing on the cake is the often dysfunctional systems put in place to administer the new systems, which have made it very clear that even the national tax authorities often don't know what they're doing. Case in point: Multiple national tax authorities have already sent waves of wildly incorrect and extremely hostile demands for payment of supposedly unpaid VAT to small businesses in other countries.
Imagine how you'd feel if you spent a year building up a side business, then one morning you woke up to a demand for over a million Euros, far more money than you'd ever made in your year of trading, saying if you didn't pay faster than you could sensibly get legal or tax advice then you'd be taken to court without further notice, inevitably killing your business.
This is the reality when the EU gets to play with legal and tax rules but the people making the rules fail to understand the basic nature of how those rules will affect smaller businesses or individual citizens who aren't over there playing the games with the politicians. It's a scary prospect, and the way forward some of the EU bureaucrats see for the Internet and for intellectual property as we're discussing today seems many times worse than the short-sightedness they showed with the VAT mess a year ago.
Germany has already made statements that it will not allow other EU members to audit and collect VAT from German companies.
I'm happy that the response to this has finally changed I got downvoted to hell when commenting on the VAT changes when news just started breaking out almost 2 years ago saying that it will kill small businesses and now after the changes were implemented people actually started to see that it have.
The system completely ignores deferential VAT rates for different items in different countries, it forces businesses to register for VAT regardless if they are VAT exempt (e.g. small businesses in the UK with under 100K in yearly revenue) and it forces them to implement a "reliable system to verify the actual point of consumption of your goods and services" without actually putting in criteria on what is reliable or how you should verify the source of consumption if the first place.
"If I use a German bank card to order and item from the UK to Spain where should the VAT be collected?" To this date I haven't received an actual consistent answer or even a consistent thought process to evaluate this. And this is the most simple scenario which can be easily made more complicated like ordering an item from Germany with German payment details to be shipped to Spain from the UK, ordering an item with German payment details from the UK while you are in Spain, ordering an item from the UK with German payment details while you are in the airport in Norway, or doing the same while you are outside of the EU completely.
And these aren't complicated scenarios they things happen all the time the amount of times I had to order something I need from Amazon in the EU to myself while being in another country is ridiculous sometimes I'll order something from Amazon UK to my UK home while I'm away, sometimes I'll order from Amazon to be delivered to some country in the EU, some time if I'll need something down the line in the trip I might order it from country a to country c while being in country b.
And while Amazon could easily deal with this because they have an army of lawyers and tax advisers that will find them all the loopholes and legal justifications to continue to do what ever the frack they want, normal businesses won't be able to coupe with these types of decisions.
So far this seems to actually benefit Amazon the most because all of the people that I know that operated their own online stores for various goods and services have actually moved their store exclusively to Amazon and the likes even when they can charge a commission in the double digits just because it was the only way for them to be able to "ignore" the new tax regulations.
Regulating very new technologies is almost always unwise. There will already be existing generic laws and regulations against serious bad outcomes (you are not allowed to knowingly kill people regardless of method) and for less serious outcomes it's generally better to let the technology shake out and take some time to study and understand it, even if there is a short-term cost to doing that.
Oh, and many payment processors won't give you necessary information to comply anyway. You need 2 pieces of evidence from every transaction (address, IP the purchase is made from for example) and you often don't have access to that information.
It's just typical "we know many small business won't be able to comply and we are not going to go after them for now but there will always be something if we need to" kind of thing.
You need 2 pieces of evidence that agree from every transaction, which is a significantly harder standard to meet.
For now, IP address is being accepted as one of them. However, most estimates seem to put geolocation as accurate only for about 90% of checks, and even if it's accurate, the information you'll get back typically won't be enough to determine which rules to apply in member states that have regional variations in their VAT rules.
It's basically impossible to comply properly with the current rules using a fully automated system, and therefore basically everyone trading on-line is risking compliance issues because you can't avoid them. The whole thing is kind of a joke, except for the not-so-funny part where your number comes up and you get business-destroying levels of overhead dealing with the audit.
- the big companies they intended to hit have the resources to deal with the problem, the smaller onces do not.
- There are such things as proxy servers and VPNs.
- many online B2C transactions within the EU are for amounts < 5 euro, the overhead of paying VAT for a single customer from say Slovenia does not weigh up against the profits so entire countries will simply be cut off from being served a variety of services.
It's a huge mess, and let's not get into the Irish authorities incompetence in setting this whole thing up and their communications with businesses all over Europe.
Incidentally, you missed one of my favourite points that the authorities still seem to have overlooked: they apparently continue to assume that those small businesses who do trade on-line are all selling something via some marketplace site, which can therefore take on much of the burden of compliance, record-keeping, and the like. I guess we'd all better start shorting Stripe, GoCardless, and friends, because presumably according to the EU they have no small business customers. ::facepalm::
And as others have also pointed out, there are plenty of very small busineses who could never afford that level of ongoing accountancy support, nor to hire people to develop the relevant record-keeping systems and automate the corresponding reporting processes.
Are we living on the same planet?
In some EU countries re-selling an item will not trigger VAT, in some it will, in some it might require some work to be done (e.g. refurbishing) in which case you need to charge VAT but even that's not that simple because in some countries you only charge VAT on the actual work and bill of material that went into the refurbishing process, in some countries you need to charge VAT for the whole amount based on the final sale price and the list goes on and on and on.
VAT MOSS also completely ignores the fact that you might be VAT exempt in your own country, if you are in the UK you can choose not to register for VAT if your business earns under 100K a year in this case you simply do not charge VAT, but well Spain doesn't care about that so they might come knocking because you have a Spanish costumer or 2.
There is no realistic way for people to figure out when and how much VAT you'll need to charge, and you'll need quite a good and expensive accountant to sort that out and even they might actually not know everything.
No, but my payment processor did.
so... I don't know anything about the EU law we're talking about, but I do know a bit about US sales tax.
First, if I sell a service, not a physical product, my understanding is that I don't pay sales tax at all. Next, even if I am selling physical product, I only need to worry about sales tax in the state in which I do business. In my case, California (and maybe Washington, as I have a contractor there.)
But really, it's a non-issue, because I'm selling a service not a product.
Now, if I was selling a product, it is more complex than it sounds. Yes, as the business, I don't worry about taxes in the states where I don't have a presence, but those customers are expected to file a 'use tax' - many people don't, and some businesses take advantage of this, for example, provantage will ship my supermicro crap from California to Ohio or some other midwestern state, then back to me, so that I don't have to pay them sales tax. It's super irritating, because I pay my use tax, so it's extra accounting work for me, and it is extra shipping money and time. I usually end up getting the provantage price and sending it to my local supermicro re-seller (kingstarusa) and buying from them afte rthey price match. But the point being that the selling company doesn't worry about sales tax if they ship a physical product to a state they don't have a presence in. That's the recipient's problem to sort out (or ignore)
But that's not really the complexity of the US sales tax system. The complexity is that within the states you do business, every county has a different sales tax. And I'm supposed to figure out what county you are in and calculate your tax. (fortunately, I don't have to pay each county; I pay the state board of equalization) - it's a pain in the ass. you need to buy a special database, because counties don't line up with zipcodes always, and yadayadayada. It's doable, just not fun. But I bet that's more complex than calculating a different vat for each EU country, though actually paying each EU country might be a bigger pain in the ass. Seems like something that could be outsourced to your payment provider, though.
(note, this information about state sales tax is about a decade out of date; that's about as long as it has been since I sold physical goods. Point being that it's both more and less complex than you imply.)
The EU isn't all good or all bad it's just huge.
"held national governments to account for privacy invasions"? They are sending our data to the US (e.g. data for airline passengers).
"have broadly stronger environment and safety legislation" Maybe on paper, the EU agencies did know for years that VW (and other EU car producer) did cheat.
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_STATEMENT-15-5654_en.ht... (ECJ overruled blanket Data Retention).
http://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-court-strikes-down-trans-atla... (safe harbour struck down).
Specific instances show there are problems but all large scale human systems are messy.
Yeah the EU isn't perfect but nothing is, I'd sooner my country (the UK) was in it than not though.
I haven't made up my mind yet about whether we're better off in the EU than out. It's obviously a complicated question. But something that is a big factor in favour of leaving is that there is so much one-sided co-operation: the EU seems to be used as a convenient excuse to justify unpopular rules that might cause political problems at home, because we "have to comply with the EU directives" or some such, yet apparently we have no trouble not complying when the EU rules are less convenient.
If you torrent for example a copyrighted mp3 and you are not leeching, you are actively uploading the file and sharing it with others.
And a lot of lawyers are now actively tracking peer-to-peer networks/torrents to see who is sharing the file. They then send out a "Abmahnung" and charge the user a few hundred euros.
Links surpassing paywalls are a non-issue, IMO. Those coming-from-Google paywall bypasses are put in place by the content copyright holders specifically for the purpose of making that possible. If they didn't want their paywall bypassed, they wouldn't have built (or would turn off) their paywall bypass for search engines.
If I wanted to control exactly who views my content and where they come from I can just check headers for internal linking or generate unique single-use URLs for each visitor.
What is the practical scenario that this legislation aims to cover?
Newspapers want Google to give them money
Google should sometimes just give people what they claim they want. "Be careful what you wish for". Unions often have "work to rule" - you do what you're paid to do and no more, and it's an effective method of industrial action.
If a newspaper site doesn't want Google to index them Google should just drop them. Maybe provide help about setting up robots.txt.
Does Google have a blog post about why they index pages behind a paywall, and why they're happy to not index pages behind paywalls? (I understand it as "we want to index stuff that people can get to. If they can't get to it we don't want to index it")
Or maybe Google should just give ads and paywalled content the same shaded background?
I for one, started hoarding data, scraping good websites for valuable information while I still can.
I am not sure what you mean by mass adoption. Sure, there has to be a critical mass for it to work. But I don't think that everyone and their dog should use it.
Part of what made "the good old days" of the web so awesome was that you needed to put in some hours to actually use it. Thanks to this, it wasn't that interesting for people who didn't want to contribute (somewhat) meaningfully.
Also, you can run nodes on other systems. This is effectively what `https://ipfs.io` is.
Then the Spanish government made it mandatory for everyone to pay the media companies, regardless - and they weren't allowed to do it directly either. They had to pay the state, who then paid the publisher. Nobody was allowed to opt-out. So Google News pulled out entirely. It was an unmitigated disaster... for the publishers:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-s...
To quote that article:
Whatever loss of traffic occurs due to readers who may read a news aggregator and then choose not to read an entire story, is more than made up for by the "market expansion" effect, the study found. In other words, given access to a news aggregator like Google, people read much more news.
The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/12/15/that-was-...
Edit: yup, it is:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study...
That's at least the plan they have come up with.
If they severely limit the Internet in the process doesn't matter to them. They'll create a shitty EU alternative if they have to.
Therefore the framework of rules must be changed. This is protectionism.
That would legitimise Torrent link trackers :-) Kind of the Spanish governments worst nightmare really. It would mean that they couldn't stop the link trackers, there would be a band of citizens who summarised news articles and made other citizens more politically active and it would help spread pirated content.
It would also cut out the middle man (Google News).
Classic own goal really.
I want to see how they would react to URL shortening services, base64-encoded outgoing redirects, links injections only on click events; you know, the gray tactics the whole internet already uses!
Please explain this one thing to me: why don't politicians work with field experts? Not just IT, but any domain, really.
http://www.kozubik.com/published/decisions.txt
I went the other way, though - my thought experiment was, what if you came up with a standard way to "say" a URL in plain english. As in, just a wordy, colloquial way to describe the content that is in a URL.
Obviously this would fall under free speech and nobody would consider barring such speech ...
So I think now, as I did then, that if you really want to demonstrate the ridiculous nature of these proposals, you need a browser plug-in that allows you to describe URLs in plain english and then demonstrate that to the court (or whomever).
>> Consider also that it would be trivial for a programmer of a web
browser to alter the behavior of the browser such that a normal text
link that points to a file determined to be a picture would result
in the actual picture being displayed - exactly as it would have been
if an inline link were being used.
Further, it would also be trivial to rewrite the browser to display the
picture in question given an english sentence on the web page that
described the address of the picture, thus prompting this (as yet)
imaginary web browser to, once again, display the picture.
>> The important point is that the behavior of any given web browser
as relates to the use of links (inline or otherwise) is in fact
completely arbitrary. Therefore the prohibition of one kind of
linking over another not only demonstrates a failure to grasp how
the underlying technology works (and could be made to work) but also
represents a legal precedent that would require constant maintenance
and revision to remain relevant.Besides, I'm not sure what 'free speech' has to do with anything. For starters we have such a thing only in the abstract in the EU; secondly, there are many, many exceptions to 'free speech' that neuter all 'absolutist interpretation of free speech' based ideas like this one.
Source: Members of the Bundestag and "Von Rettern und Rebellen" by Klaus-Peter Willsch
I don't get this. They should automatically reject anything they didn't have time to read.
I'm pretty hopeless, especially because there's no way on gods green earth to get rid of this guy. EU is so high above country level politics (yet defines >80% of laws in the end), it's hard to even get people to the voting booth. And even if they do, it's completely parliamentary, no chance to influence anything.
It doesn't help that completely incompetent politicians in the country parties get dilbertized one level up so they "can't hurt anymore". This pirate politician is about the only one there decently transparent and accountable.
I'm not sure the EC is conscious of that, because it would have huge consequences. The cost of academic research papers, for instance, with their pages full of references, would become dramatically high to produce, or even impossible (what if I don't want you to talk about my works ?)
You mean, DRM, rootkits, hardware TPMs, etc? Personally, I prefer copyright, at least it can be easily ignored.
DRM would have an uphill battle if it could not hitch a ride on the legitimacy of copyright. They need to be separated. One protects transient and ever-changing business models, one protects human creativity in a virtuous circle inspired by past creativity.
I feel sad, very sad.
That's not really the most straight forward reasoning? I'd say linking is not COPYright infringement because nothing is ever copied.
I agree though, let them do it. Someone has to show everyone what nonsense this is. Cautionary tales serve a purpose.
We got Christian Engström last term, and we have Julia Reda this term. They're doing a ton of good. We need more.
I love the idea, but that decision leaves me with little confidence that it'll catch on.
Don't blame it on the politicians. You guys elected these people. They're just following the ideology of their politics.
I'm giving up. The political system is broken beyond repair.
Content publishers should properly lock their front doors, too, and not have spare keys lying around all over the place.
Disclosure: I operate a link shortener [1] that pays people based on their traffic using interstitial advertising.
Or, put another way, if links had been copyright violations from the start, would we think that it was a sensible and logical characteristic of copyright?
https://www.google.com/search?q=Hyperlinking+to+the+Site+fro...
In the fantasy technocracy - unless it was totalitarian communism - there would be instruments to sound the markets for need for legislation and big capital would have as much say so there as here now.
*In the U.S.
i don't get the point. someone wants to control a wan. is that a news?
Does it have to be only the usual <a href="#">text</a> ?
What if I do this: <div link="#">text</div>
And then I use JavaScript to redirect, is it still considered a hyperlink?
Have I just found a loop hole? :)
The EU commissions overall feel like they are flailing around making up the rules they go. At least when courts in the US disagree, it is about adherence to precedent and the constitution, not appeasing whatever group is lobbying them at the time.
(2) The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.*
"For the prevention of disorder of crime, for the protection of health and morals for the protection of the reputation or rights of others" -- those are wide, gaping holes which make this statement absolutely useless.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time...
> For the prevention of disorder of crime
There are all sorts of types of speech that are criminal in the US because they are either a crime, or encourage/enable crime in some way.
> for the protection of health and morals
There are plenty of examples in the US of speech being limited for health reasons.
Protection of morals is a bit more of a gray area, but certainly there are historical examples of the US limiting speech for reasons that amount to morality.
> for the protection of the reputation or rights of others
Again, libel is a crime in the US.
The difference is evidenced by the "right to be forgotten" ruling in Europe, where the ability to hide past actions was deemed more important than the right to publicize those links / events.
There is no criminal defamation in the U.S. at a federal level, and only a minority of states have such an offense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law#C...
According to the Wikipedia page said laws are rarely used, though I cannot speak to that myself.