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Comment by srtjstjsj | Hacker News Reader

The "link tax" appears to be a myth invented by the opposition to stoke the emotions of readers like you.

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.

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This isn't quite an accurate description either.

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.

As for the google requiring a snippet, you can always change what it is or disable it. https://support.google.com/gsa/answer/2672315?hl=en

Opt-out instead of opt-in?

Is there not an EU equivalent of US "fair use" law?

It's hard to imagine a world in which you cannot quote short amounts of copyrighted material. For review, discussion, brief reference, etc.

Yes, it is actually written into the Berne Convention as the right to quote [1]. And this is not going away at all. You will still be able to quote from articles in other articles, in blog posts, or in online discussions.

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).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote

Still, videos on youtube get routinely taken down for using smaller snippets of works.

That's completely unrelated to ancillary copyright (the Article 11 stuff), however. That's the DMCA. You still have the right to quote, but Youtube is not required to host your content for pretty much whatever reason they like, including just taking whatever causes the least trouble for them in case of a DMCA takedown notice.

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.

Well, currently it's related to DMCA, but that would become mandatory with Article 13 and for other categories of work (like text/images, etc) - if not explicitly mandatory, implicitly mandatory with the new amendments

Article 11 is the "link tax"

Well, but this subthread was originally about Article 11. I'm not sure how you are getting from that to Article 13?

That sounds much more plausible. Had a feeling this source was probably an exaggeration of the truth

Imagine how less useful Google will be if it only show page titles?

Lots of website have misleading title. Without a snippet in search result, I need to open each and every links on the search page.

If there were no snippet in Google search result page, then quickly it would become a feature of all web browser to display such snippet of each link on hover, though.

meta name=”description” content=”why not just go back to how it used to be"

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