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josteink

This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate.

So I guess this is bad.

--goes and reads article--

> Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved.

What the fucking FUCK?

Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web?

Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation?

I'm honestly not able to come up with an analogy which sufficiently illustrates just how backwards this whole thing is.

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The law was basically made at the publisher’s behest to get Google to pay them. So far, it has spectularly backfired.

In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated.

In Spain, they went a bit further and wrote into the law that Google had to list news sites in their index. So Google News shut down in Spain. Law defeated.

I guess, third time’s the charm?

So Google gets licenses to link to new sites for free, but smaller companies and private people's website cannot link to news sites?

Yes. Exactly.

And the whole law was enacted because of Google.... Let's have regulation for regulation's sake!

But it's just not link, it's show a snippet (and potentially a title)

(or you can link and replace every snippet with 'censored by the EU' or something - might be a good strategy for raising awareness)

Showing the snippet makes people more likely to click through, not less. If you aren't a copyright maximalist, how is that not good for both aggregator and news site?

A better question is whether it's good for the user. Filter bubble, and all.

> Showing the snippet makes people more likely to click through, not less. If you aren't a copyright maximalist, how is that not good for both aggregator and news site?

Exactly. But publishers still think they're in the 20th century

This isn't true if you realize what sort of "snippets" they are trying to deal with. Google has been scraping content for Knowledge Graph, and offering up "the answers" so that users don't click through any links. So Google rips off other companies' content, and has basically said "if you don't like it, feel free to block Google with robots.txt and get delisted from search".

So Google has left the option that sites either give Google their content for free, and go out of business, or get delisted from search entirely, and go out of business.

https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... is a pretty good example of why this is happening.

I've literally never seen one of those knowledge-graph snippets relating to current news? Google News now has stopped showing teaser texts for news for some publishers after a similar German law was passed, but "surprisingly" the majority of publishers preferred to allow Google to show teasers... (Which is why there's now talk of forbidding publishers to grant that permission for free)

I thought the newest reincarnation prevents such licences (i.e. it makes it impossible to waive the right to linking fee)?

...what stops Google from just buying a newspaper, then?

For Spain that just got local news delisted with no legal recourse.

Note the text 'and an inalienable right to obtain an fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses'

The idea is to make it impossible to give Google a free license.

The best outcome would be if Google would refuse to link to any content of European publishers.

"The best outcome would be if Google would refuse to link to any content of European publishers."

Not so much sure that's the "best" outcome as the only possible one. As rich as Google looks, when you start dividing their income by multiple multiplicative factors it doesn't last long; the log of Google's income isn't all that large.

On the other hand, Google definitely has a lot of cash to weather what to them will be at most a partial disruption of their money making system (as this is back in the linear domain rather than the log domain), whereas the online publications that get delisted from Google will be devastated.

I would predict with some confidence that if this does pass all the way into law in the EU that it would be unlikely to last very long as law. But it can cause a lot of damage in the meantime.

There are quite a few similar rights. One example is that radio stations don't have enter agreements with individual rights owners to license songs. There is blanket fee. Similar payments are for playing music in bars, restaurants and other public spaces, for copying machines, blank CDs (and video and cassette tape), etc. All of those fees are set to collect money, not to kill of that use.

The difference this time, is that contracts with individual rights owners are specifically excluded.

So the fee is likely going to be an amount that Google can afford. But for the good of the Internet, it would be best if Google refuses and shows EU citizens that copyright has gone way beyond reasonable.

>One example is that radio stations don't have enter agreements with individual rights owners to license songs.

Isn't that because the music creator already entered an agreement with a rights organization? If the music creator didn't enter an agreement with a rights organization, the station would have to directly enter an agreement with the musician. The musician has the power to decide whether to sign with the organization or not.

The musician doesn't have much choice here. Radio stations will only perform music licensed by the rights organizations, so either they join and get some money, or they don't and get zip. Rights organizations typically invert the burden of proof. Even worse, if they do join, in many countries they are no longer allowed to license their music in another way. In Belgium for example they are expressly forbidden from releasing their own music under a creative commons license.

Another thing rights organizations are notorious for are overbroad claims. They invert the burden of proof and require all performances to prove they are not playing licensed songs, and all music publishers to prove they are not publishing licensed songs. There is a lot of bureaucracy involved with this inverted burden of proof, which has no legal basis except that rights organizations can afford big legal bills and those on the other side mostly cannot.

I find this whole rights organization business to be nothing but a legalized racket.

At least in Finland, the state-sanctioned music copyright organization has a legal authority to sell performance permissions to all of the music in the world. Maybe someone in South America wrote a song, and that person has never even heard of Finland. But if you want to perform that song in Finland, you can buy the permit from the Finnish organization.

Capitalism here. We'd just charge Google the absolute minimum amount (0.00000000001 cent per click) and outdo our competition.

Proposal here, the language is a bit cleverer than "above zero".

https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/voss11.pdf

> fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses

Simple really: "BigMedia" want me to pay to link to this, so here's the same topic on SmallMediaSite.

I wanted to link this, but "BigMedia" want me to pay, so now I'm not even mentioning their title of the topic.

> Simple really: "BigMedia" want me to pay to link to this, so here's the same topic on SmallMediaSite.

It's actually more damaging than that from the perspective of EU regulators: "I can't link to that Le Monde article, so here's a WaPo piece about the same subject".

Internet content delivery spans borders, by design. All this does is disadvantage the local producers and force their customer's eyeballs offshore.

> Internet content delivery spans borders, by design. All this does is disadvantage the local producers and force their customer's eyeballs offshore.

Coupled with GDPR and many websites around the world shutting down or closing their doors to European users, there won't be many places to go.

The overarching trend of artificial borders on the internet is terrifying.

I don't understand trying to conflate GDPR and this copyright proposal.

GDPR is a reasonably written attempt to preserve some measure of citizen privacy (i.e. you and me). It's an extension and continuation of Data Protection that's been there 20 years. Companies coped with no ill effect.

The copyright proposal is entirely for the benefit of large media companies, and the smell of lobbyists is overpowering. (i.e. not you and me)

> Coupled with GDPR and many websites around the world shutting down or closing their doors to European users,

That’s hyperbole. Most websites provenly don’t.

The GDPR is reasonable. This is not.

No need to conflate them.

Google News is still shut in Spain: https://support.google.com/news/answer/6140047?hl=es

Laws don't work like that. It you think any law was defeated you very mistaken about how laws and government bureaucracy works.

The law still applies and all that happened is that Google gets a free license and everyone who is not Google has to pay licensing fees.

While your point is true, the GP was talking from the perspective of Google vs the publishers. I guess "defeated" probably wasn't a wise description but I think his / her general point is still valid.

Belgium, too (only Walloon publishers sued); I'm not sure if that was before or after Germany, but the result was the same.

>>> In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated.

I don't know the detail but the way you put it seems very fair to me. Law protect publishers against Google, so they can say to Google "no", except that their interest is to say "yes". So they say "yes". Looks to me that even if the end result is the same, the publishers had a say. Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking. Now, it has to ask. Looks fair to me.

I agree. Even though the end result is back where they started.

Except you always have a say in whether or not Google takes any part of your site. Google have always respected robots.txt and it's trivial to block your site, or parts of it, from being indexed and shown in searches.

Except you won't be able to delist content without first allowing their crawler to rummage your site and returning 404 to Googlebot. Happened to me - I wanted to delist a single URL because it was generating unwanted traffic but still keep it accessible to those who have a direct link.

The fundamental mechanics of the internet are such that there's no sensible justification around having to ask. It inherently makes no sense to have to ask to link to something online, especially for a news site. If they don't want someone linking to them then there are ways to avoid being linked to (requiring accounts, one-time links, requiring specific referral metadata), but by putting something on the internet you are implicitly enabling and encouraging links.

Google actually does ask, it is called robots.txt [0]. Robots.txt is the technical equivalent of asking nicely. If the publishers don't want Google using snippets of their articles or otherwise indexing their articles all publishers need to do is tell Google not to using robots.txt, no law needed [1].

This law won't hurt Google, they have the necessary lawyers and resources to deal with the ramifications. What this will hurt are the smaller search engines that don't have the same resources as Google. This law, if enacted, will end up giving more power to Google not less. For example, with the German law, Google was given a free license [2], but was DuckDuckGo given a license? As far as I can tell no. So all that changed is that Google has a license and its competitors don't. I can't see how this is a good thing for anybody but Google. It hurts consumers, reduces market choice and will end up hurting publishers.

[0] - http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html

[1] - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608

[2] - https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/22/german-publishers-...

> Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking

Google News does not automatically take your content. You have to apply explicitely to get it included.

For regular search, there's always robots.txt. Claiming that there are any media/content producers who get included into the index against their will is absurd propaganda. Of course they want to be listed. They just want money, and Google has money, so they "convince" local politicians to make Google pay them their "share". Just like the Mafia.

Laws that don't solve actual problems are a problem.

> Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking

No it does not, you need a lot of steps to make your website available on Google News, it does not work by default.

Law is not defeated.

It means that Google, due to its market power, got the clips for free. Everyone else might be asked to pay.

It's actually anticompetitive.

I totally understand the intention behind it - you see what the death of good media and rise of clickbait/shill articles did to US and UK. The other EU governments are terrified their own information landscape might go similarly downhill - and all you have left is spam, lies, propaganda and corporate ads hidden as articles.

It's just that the approach taken here is the wrong one. They are trying to fix something but shoot at the symptoms, not the cause.

It's also true that Google is exploitative in how it uses its ad + News Power (Look at the content preloader discussion) so clearly it's not aiming at the innocent. It's just not the right tool for the job. Probably because so far no one has figured out how to fix this...

> Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web?

It's absolute madness.

Some people say that you can't solve political problems with technology but at this point it seems to me that politicians are ruining the web and there is no stopping them by political means. So it will have to be a technological solution. We need strong anonymization and strong decentralization to become the default.

The rules that are being put in place here are very dangerous to democracy. It limits the dissemination of information. You don't need to believe that there is any "evil" intent (I don't think there is, I think it's just greed on the part of businesses and lack of understanding on the part of the politicians) to see that once these limitations come into effect it becomes easier to lie to people and to control them.

We are setting ourselves up for fascist governments to be able to rise and it seems that most people don't even care :(

Perhaps the solution is political, but it involves breaking up the worlds current political order i.e. "democracy".

Listening to Yanis Varoufakis talk about what Greece went through you get the sense that what they have on the Europe wide level isn't exactly democracy.

> Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation?

why do you think they're out of touch? they know exactly what they're doing: what they've been told to by the media companies

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/2...

I'm not too worried about this one.

This will just mean platforms will not link to publishers. EVER

It already failed in Spain and Germany, they will just shoot themselves in the foot again.

I wrote a Romanian news concentrator as a hobby project, guess I will have to put it down now. They were 99% bullshit anyway - clickbait and fake news. That's what they are protecting.

Why not just use URL shortener outside of EU?

Would you fund the lawsuits they'll get?

If the link shortener is operated by an entity outside the EU is it still subject to EU law?

You'll get the lawsuit, not the link shortener.

If I use the article title and main image thumbnail I might still be under legal restrictions.

So does this mean *this HN post is illegal because it links to a news article?

No. According to the so called link-tax article, it is not linking but putting content that makes a platform liable.

So this HN post would not be illegal because of the link, but maybe because of the title that was "stolen" from the publisher. The aim is at news.google.com and other search engines and news aggregators that include a blurb coming from the article along the link. To be honest, it is not yet clear if they intend for the title to be taxed or not.

> it is not linking but putting content that makes a platform liable

All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though.

> All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though.

Like this one.

> Like this one

Not quite. My previous comment linked to another comment. I don't believe that would be covered by this copyright proposal.

What would be covered would be a HN user posting a link to an EU publication, my reading it, and then quoting from a portion of it. The simplest fix appears to be banning linking to EU publications.

I don’t usually try to deliberately ask stupid questions, but I can’t help myself in this instance.

What counts as a EU publication? The author residing in the EU? Someone with a special “publisher” license? The author possessing EU citizenship? EU readership? .eu domain name? The domain registrar? The physical servers of the web hosting service? The backup service? What about those that use cloud services who have their physical infrastructure spread out wherever? And various combinations of the above…

Lastly, how would checking any of these be implemented by the software that’s supposed to be scanning for content that could possibly be in violation?

@jumpcrisscross if ernesth was from the EU though, would his comment count as an EU publication?

But without a sample of the content, the title, links are useless, see my sibling comment.

If the content you use is written by you rather than the linked site, you are not concerned by this article. So paraphrasing the article or using an automatic summarization should keep you clear.

In addition, fair use laws protect you take an excerpt and present it alongside the link. 5% or 10% of the content depending on jurisdiction.

Not because it links, but because it uses the headline (which is copyright protected) as the link text.

In this special case, it might not be a violation as it links to a public service broadcast site.

(IANAL)

Yes. For example meneame.net, a Spanish news aggregator, has no links to any major Spanish newspaper, because a law of this sort is in place in Spain. They would have to pay to link or quote in any way, which includes a description of the link in most cases. Basically you can't write any meaningful text in your <a href=></>.

Maybe this will improve the quality of HN submissions :P It's probably meant to make links to pirate torrents illegal though. If you have already made something publicly available eg availably for everyone for free, and you intent is to get as many readers as possible, then you can't really complain, and a sane judge would just laugh at anyone trying to sue for linking to it. What news sites used to complain about is that readers did not click on the article to go to the news site, as most of the article could be read on Google, with images and all.

False. They will shoot themselves in the foot, yes. But at least in Germany, Google is the only entity which was granted a free "licence" by the collecting society.

This puts Google in a better place than any other news aggregator.

Any lawsuit in progress with regards to that?

It's not illegal, so that would require a law change. Which is what this article is about.

It sounds very much like discrimination - if no other aggregator / news site gets the same treatment.

Interesting argument. Because this is the same anti-trust argument the publishers used against Google: "Google has monopolistic power, so they should be obliged to list our content (and then, pay)".

On that argument the Spanish version of the copyright law, Google decided to shut down News for Spain completely.

Even the most well-intentioned regulations often end up benefitting the largest and most entrenched industry players. The term is "regulatory capture".

In Spain they _had to_ link to publishers, so Google has shut down their service.

No, the problem was that publishers were not permitted to grant free licenses.

>> Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved.

>What the fucking FUCK?

This does not surprise me!

If your site has for example 5 article titles from CNN, linking all of them to original CNN articles, probably you have more benefit from that than CNN.

People this days like to skim through titles and not even bothering to read full articles, to click link.

So then obviously CNN should never write an article again and isn't a profitable business...

That is complete and utter nonsense. Linking itself adds value - see the uproar with Facebook getting rid of news in the feed. If the publishers genuinely felt as you do, they would simply prevent content being linked to by Google News/etc. Instead they want to demand payment for it, and force the behavior instead of letting Google choose cheaper news sources to link to.

That's why we have so much clickbait.

Hmm... so maybe it's not all bad? If it gets rid of clickbait ;)

If a single publisher chooses to do that, they only hurt themselves, Google is far too big.

If it's forced for all publishers, it might actually have an effect.

Then why pass a law? If what you say is true, the publishers could enter alliances with each other and block Google with robots.txt until Google agrees to pay. I believe the answer is that some MEPs don't really care if it "works" or not, because they can blame Google when Google blocks traffic. They want to be seen as standing up to American tech companies.

So here the BBC derives benefit, but doesn't fall under the regulations if there aren't clickable links?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers

That's one of the reasons I frequent this site, so I don't have to wade through dozen bad homepages laden with adds to find interesting articles.

And it is also why I used RSS in the past but I wonder how that will be handled.

The draft explicitly excludes hyperlinks from copyright protection.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

I think that Article 11 will backfire. What if Google decides to remove all publishers from search results to avoid having to pay a fee? Their traffic will tank.

If Google doesn't link to anything anymore, its own traffic may hurt a bit as well.

There's plenty of non-EU news to link to.

Sure, but most of it isn't particularly interesting for EU readers. The vast majority isn't even in their own language.

Only temporarily. A lot of publishers would be happy to increase their current market share to cover EU content. At least for English, French and Spanish, I could easily see some foreign media boosting their traffic.

Propaganda organs like Russia Today already have versions translated in various European languages. They would be absolutely delighted to be the last and only piece of internet news to be available on google. Europe is shooting itself on the foot as always.

Al Jazeera news has an English-language version, oriented towards readers in English-speaking countries.

RT is the same.

News aggregators can link to journalism sources like these without having to pay extra fees.

Of course, it might seem problematic that EU readers would get news from a Middle Eastern state-owned news source and a propaganda outlet of the Russian government, but if that's what the EU wants, it's their right to legislate that.

I think Google would win that game of chicken.

Yeah, if the law makes EU traffic unprofitable Google will just shut it down. The GDPR started that trend to an admittedly very small extent, but this would basically make the EU a no-go zone for affected online businesses.

On the one hand I can see how stupid these laws are in view of how the Web currently works and how successful it is.

On the other hand, I think companies like Google and Facebook are FAR too large and powerful and I think the only way to deal with that is by making the Web less good at what it does.

See also: What does it mean cut off your nose to spite your face?

Those laws have been tried in several European countries, and the strategy is always the same:

- Google had to exclude the plaintiffs or shut down the service because they were not allowed to operate it without a license, and could not get a license in time;

- Deprived of Google traffic, the News site audience suddenly dropped and they granted Google a free license, as an emergency process to keep the lights on;

- Google keeps that free license for all sites, every other operator simply doesn’t have the capacity to reach out to every site, so competition to Google is completely killed.

The worst part of all this? There is a very old convention, well enforced, that already handles it: robots.txt

Yes. It was impossible because it was always single sites doing it, and that doesn't work. To prevent that scenario, this law is for all news sites and doesn't allow free licenses.

No idea how it'll work out.

Either Google will pay... or they won't. If they won't, nobody can find European news articles, and news traffic drops, and news sites get financially hurt (just like it's played out several times in the past). Then they'll get the idea that the law was a stupid idea, and work to get it quickly changed.

If I understand correctly, which way this goes is completely at Google's discretion. And Google hasn't shown inclination to cooperate with such schemes in the past...

They're dismantling content aggregation as a business model. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Notably, the pure act of linking is not what is being require d a licensing fee for. Rather if you take exerpts of the content (like for example Twitter link previews)

This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate.

This is usually the case. it’s not possible for them to be experts on everything.

Probably best to actually read article 11 before commenting.

> This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate.

It's very naive to think that highly intelligent people don't know or care about what they regulate. I think it is the exact opposite. They care and understand deeply.

> Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web?

Amazing isn't it.

> Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation?

Think about who this benefits. You are just viewing it from one side. Who stands to benefit from all this?

> It's very naive to think that highly intelligent people don't know or care about what they regulate.

These may be highly intelligent people, but what they are highly skilled at is the art of obtaining and keeping political office. That does not necessarily say anything about their knowledge of the industries they regulate, or their ability to write regulations that are free from disastrous side effects.

> Think about who this benefits. You are just viewing it from one side. Who stands to benefit from all this?

Maybe you could actually say something, instead of just hinting?

> These may be highly intelligent people, but what they are highly skilled at is the art of obtaining and keeping political office.

Agreed. That's my point.

> That does not necessarily say anything about their knowledge of the industries they regulate, or their ability to write regulations that are free from disastrous side effects.

They had teams of people helping them understand. Do you think these experts who work for the politicians and/or the industry don't know what the side effects are? Just because the effects would be "disastrous" for you and me doesn't mean it will be disastrous for the politicians or the people who they work for.

> Maybe you could actually say something, instead of just hinting?

I thought it was obvious. And I was trying to get you to actually think.

Do you think these guys just decided one day to make changes to the rules of the internet for fun? Why do you think they are making these changes? If you can figure it out, then let me know.

> ... What the fucking FUCK?

You seem to have it all figured out. Did you do any serious research on the subject that could perhaps justify your perspective? You criticize the proposal mostly because it brings change, but you do not really analyze its impact.

The lawmakers in the committee have probably spent hours studying this proposal and discussing it in detail with field experts and other affected parties. The result of their vote was far from unanimous, which means that they were not able to reach a generally acceptable consensus. To me, that indicates that the judgement about the proposal is not simple or straightforward and that quick conclusions of the "hold my beer" type should be avoided.

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