6 days until the EU votes on an extinction-level event for the internet
boingboing.net
boingboing.net
What the actual f...? Is this real life or an Onion article? Does anyone have any sense of how likely it is that this would actually pass? Do EU lawmakers know what a hyperlink actually is?
To think, in my day the measure of success on the web was getting more people to link to your content...
I'll just get some popcorn.
The actual proposal is copyright over the content of articles, so that search engines and blogs couldn't (without a license) post content snippets that circumvent the publisher's website and monetize their own sites in its place. There are valid criticisms (chilling effects around needing a license before repeating or summarizing content), but they aren't the ones boingboing and friends are crowing about.
Lots of website have misleading title. Without a snippet in search result, I need to open each and every links on the search page.
It's hard to imagine a world in which you cannot quote short amounts of copyrighted material. For review, discussion, brief reference, etc.
The problem is that the right to quote does not cover a mere mechanical aggregation of quotes; the resulting work must still be an original work. This affects primarily news aggregators and search engines (insofar as they quote from press publications).
Your right to quote exists vis-à-vis the copyright holder, not third parties. A frivolous DMCA notice may hypothetically get the copyright holder in hot water, but does not affect your contractual relationship with Youtube. And Youtube does not have to defend your rights for you, they just have to comply with the notification, takedown, and counter-notification requirements.
Article 11 is the "link tax"
Publishers can already prevent search engines from posting snippets of their websites; they can block search engines with robots.txt.
This is an attempt to "have your cake and eat it too" by forcing search engines to display content in a specific format that publishers prefer. Right now Google can say "if you want to be listed, you must allow us to show a snippet"; this law tries to change that. It's dumb.
This seems entirely reasonable to me.
Because there's no penalties for falsely taking down content (like Sony taking down an amateur recording of Beethoven/Bach)
It targets content sharing networks, it's not simply about "what you publish in your own website" and it makes the platforms liable, not who uploaded it.