The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News
eff.org
eff.org
Having your revenue down by 50-60% (hopefully) because you’re dumb enough to think that your lobbying is the smartest idea sound like justice.
I just can’t believe that the EU is actually doing this. It puts a really bad taste in my mouth that it tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because of large lobbyist corporations.
This is generally how government works! But it's even worse than usual in the EU, since it's an unaccountable transnational mega-bureaucracy; MEPs are not directly elected, they are appointed by their political party after proportional representation votes (which haven't had turnout higher than 50% since 1994).
You think Congress is beholden to lobbyists now? Imagine how bad it'd be if state representatives could get "re-elected" each term without ever having to put their record to a public vote!
I think in Bulgaria you had to vote for a political party and a person from it. Then add proportianl representation and the ppl with the most votes in each party will go into the EP based on their respective % of the total votes. (idk if this makes sense as it might sound a bit confusing)
I can't really find any good summary, but this sparse wikipedia article will give you an idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote
In the US, factual information can not be copyrighted.
I believe it can in the EU, although I might be misrepresenting their official stance. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that the EU allows you to copyright databases. I'm sure EU residents can correct me if I'm missing some kind of subtlety.
At least in the US though, there is nothing remotely illegal about looking up a fact on a website and then giving it to someone else directly, even if that diverts traffic away from the original site. Copyright was never intended to cover stuff like that.
I agree.
The vast majority of the world disagrees with copyright. They participate in violations on an everyday basis. Many of them possibly hundreds of times per day.
Essentially, we have a distributed proof that your "copyright" is damage to be routed around. Nonsense. Piffle.
Lawmakers will not win this fight except by enslaving their population. People _do not want_ this. Empirically, provably, visibly.
We happened to have some recent news stories related to the topic plus a very relevant, recent photo.
This was reused (without asking) by a major news outlet. The photo especially bumped their views numbers.
When we enquired about their use of our content, they said they were quoting and, after further prodding, that they could pay us a nominal fee.
Notice a problem with that?
We had to: 1. Be aware that our content is being used, 2. Be the side that is active in seeking renumeration, 3. Try to fight a major news organisation if we wanted a real cut of their ad revenue.
How do you do this if you are small?
Changing the balance and the burden is definitely a move to the right direction, in this case.
The big media and ad companies (Facebook, Google) are effectively making money off someone else's work. I could understand it when they were new and their market was still developing, today however they've grown too strong, I feel.
This seems like a cultural difference between copyright proponents and critics (both in the US and EU). To me, this criticism is meaningless. I think that the whole point of modern society is to allow people to make money off of other people's work.
I think there some people who look at a business being built off of other's work, and they say, "By default, we should be suspicious of this with a few exceptions. Unless the public good is enormous (arguably search engines still qualify there), if I make something, only I should profit from it."
Other people look at those businesses and say, "By default, this is the system working completely as intended. Unless the public harm is enormous, if you make something, other people should be able to make things with it."
It's worth noting that in the example you bring up, the news outlet wasn't doing anything with linking or user generated content. Their editorial board just stole your photo. You'd be in the exact same position after this law, because they weren't doing anything that would pass your photo through an upload filter, and they (probably) weren't directly linking to the photo on your site.
Given that the example you list is very clearly something that is not fair use, it seems to me like an even bigger jump than normal to move from "sometimes people steal stuff" to "Google in specific is stealing stuff."
And how does one find new sites in the first place.
People will now go for news to Google. Google doesn't hire a single journalist and will happily cash in all the ad money. It is not sustainable.
> Recital 32 suggests that (1) anyone who wants to link to the news has to have a separate, commercial license; and (2) news companies can't waive this right, even through Creative Commons licenses and other tools for granting blanket permission.
Unless they're enforcing across-the-board licenses with standard fees though, it's difficult for me to imagine how you would force a publisher not to enter into some kind of special agreement, so I don't know how extensive these kinds of restrictions can actually get in practice.
But there will be too much collateral.
This link-tax however is so extremely flawed, so obviously lobbied by special interest and just fundamentally backwards wrt how the www works...
I can’t see how they think they’re going to win the public opinion to support or respect it.
But I don't see how regulation would have prevented that, nor any improvement of any regulation so far.
Did it stop facebook from manipulating the communication of their users? Did it stop google from harvesting data out of most websites?
It mostly just created work and more annoying banners for people to click away, but no real improvement I see. But you see more? Maybe you mean the recent discussion in germany that landlords might have to remove the names on the door? Or new opportunities for bored and greedy lawers to sue websites who did not care or knew enough and don't have lawers on their own?
If people actually implemented a cookie banner that was compliant, I would like that they are there. Because that means I could filter them away and I could be safe in the knowledge there were no tracking cookies. As it stands, you can see a lot of angry people making things that sound acceptable in the US (by continuing to browse, you agree to [...]) but is actually just not compliant. That's a sad state of affairs, but it's not the fault of the GDPR in my view.
In the request I requested all the data they had on us, their reason for keeping it and how they obtained it. Secondly, I demanded they remove us from all of their databases, including those of their vendors.
This is now my good right under the GDPR and I am very happy that these tools exist to allow simple citizens like me to reign in untouchable companies' use of my personal data. It measurably improves my life.
I don't see how the GDPR not preventing Google from harvesting website data is in any way relevant or a measure of GDPR usefulness.
It only runs the show if you let them. You can still live outside of the Google/Facebook world happily.
A few billion in fines for anti competitive behavior would disagree. Google does not want you to have a choice.
> You can still live outside of the Google/Facebook world happily.
Can you? Most restaurants in my area publish their hours and menus using Facebook, others integrate themselves with Google. And how could I fault them? It certainly is cheaper than what they did in the past, paying for a minimal website to do the same. Unless some government comes down on them hard they will continue to infect every aspect of modern live.
All the people lamenting Facebook: simply stop using it.
Yes, you can. Nobody is holding a gun on your head to use Facebook and Google. You don't have to look up restaurants using these services, and if your restaurant is not listed there, you can go in person, or call you know? Or avoid such restaurants altogether. There is absolutely no obligation except habits that have formed over time. And habits can be broken.
The simplicity of it all is that it relies on the same two methods most indirect taxation works, ignorance and exploitation of jealousy. The ignorance part is easy, the public doesn't understand the scope of the issue or how it is a tax on their activities. The jealousy is sold by portraying those being taxed directly as not paying their fair share and such. Indirect taxes are the unseen but real burden on your paycheck
The big problem for the EU is that the internet is effectively a border-less global playing field which makes is very hard to enforce laws, taxes and regulations locally. I agree that their current approach is deeply flawed but at the same time it doesn't seem like we're nearing any kind of global governance for the internet so it seems that the alternative is either Chinese-style crass protectionism or just giving up and letting Google and Facebook eat the European web without giving anything back. Pick your poison.
Democracy means power of the people. That is more than just voting.
If most of the people decide to use google and facebook although hating it, than maybe they deserve what they get. I don't like Facebook, I don't use it. I like google less every year, I use it less.
But I don't cry and whine for my politicians to tell those evil corporations to do what I want. They are free to offer me what they want. And I am free to decline and use something else.
And this may be smug, but if more people would act like that, there would be more real alternatives.
And my home is free to be photographed from the outside from anyone. I do not loose anything because of that. Neither do I loose, if friends upload pictures they made. If I do not want to be on a picture I tell them the moment they make it. Or we consent on private use only. And if people make pictures without consent they are not my friends and there are laws for that. (but I actually do not care about that so much)
What I care about it is my communication. I want to be able to communicate with friends all over the world, without a company being able to control and influence that communication. Which is why I do not use Facebook at all.
And I am able to do that, with all the people important to me. The people who insist on facebook ... I can miss out.
And again: yes the situation IS shitty, but I don't see any improvement from regulations at all. Quite the contrary: we just got the annoying "We use Cookies" banners. But the tracking goes on as ever.
Set a single income tax rate for all businesses that they pay on revenue, not on profits. Do the same for individuals as well. No deductions, no credits. If you make $200k a year, your taxes are the same whether you have zero dependants or twelve.
Similarly, if you made $200M in revenue, you pay taxes on the $200M.
This is a little difficult because I have no idea how to account for Google putting ads for Pixel devices on Google search results or Facebook peddling their Alexa device in Instagram but there must be a way to force companies to report this as revenue. No idea how this will work for the Google home page for which there is no established price structure.
We can still keep a progressive tax regime. Maybe 0% income tax for revenues under a certain amount and higher taxes for higher brackets. But people never want to listen. They keep saying oh grocery stores will go out of business or whatever. I think it is pretty silly. We can't have it both ways. If we want to prevent legal tax avoidance, we must act to prevent tax avoidance.
Let's say chopping down trees costs $100, turning wood into chairs costs $100, and selling chairs also costs $100. Let's assume companies are non-profits (to make things easier).
Company A Spends $100 to create a unit of wood.
Company B spends $100 for a unit of wood, and spends $100 to make that into a chair, and sells for $200.
Company C spends $200 to buy a chair, spends $100 to have a nice shop and friendly sales people, and sells for $300.
Now let's add taxes! We'll do 10% to make the numbers easy.
Company A pays $10 taxes.
Company B pays $20 taxes.
Company C pays $30 taxes.
Total taxes paid on a chair bought at company C: $60.
Now we introduce company D. Company D is large, and can produce its own wood, has its own chair-making factory, and has its own shop. A chair at company D also costs $300. But company D only has to pay $30 in taxes!
In the real world, company D will immediately drive companies A, B, and C out of business (or acquire them!) because it can sell its chairs cheaper, because it only had to pay taxes once.
The problem with your suggested solution is that companies owning their entire production line get an immediate tax-advantage over smaller companies who do not. If implemented, there would still be legal tax avoidance by simply forming bigger companies.
Apropos... popular macro-economic theory is based more or less on the idea that the economic financial system is not sensitive to conditions like these. As you just showed, it's actually quite trivial to demonstrate that it is.
All retail business will be the first to die. Because when your supermarket charges you $1 for milk, they would have to pay 20 cents (or whatever your tax rate is). They also have to buy the milk. Since margins are typically around 2% or 3% in this segment, any tax >3% will make retail impossible or dramatically increase prices.
So congratulation for effectively demonstration the danger of this ignorant trend of mindless hate of "government", and "experts": Those that believe they have easy solutions don't even notice when what they're proposing would cause widespread famine.
Taking on extra employees or switching to a local producer will reduce your tax bill. The government is then collecting payroll taxes from the new employee so it doesn't miss out too much.
If you're a global coffee chain that didn't make any 'profit' because you licence your logo from a subsidiary based in Switzerland. Well, that can't be deducted so you will be paying tax.
In that case it suffers from the same failures as OP: Starbucks would seize to exist because coffee still makes up 50%+ of their cost of doing business. And it adds an extra layer of "but why?" with an artificial distinction between domestic and foreign-produced goods.
I agree for the GDPR but not with this copyright directive, it's a massive disaster lobbied by the large copyright holders.
the same GDPR is also currently used to turn people away from hospitals, as those require tens of pages of signatures in order for them to be able to treat you.
does it matter to the state that they're abusing gdpr? to the contrary. they've just found another toy to fuck us over. meanwhile I'm not only abused by the state, but a bunch of US-based websites basically cut off europe from the rest of the world.
in the end all I can say is that while I support the principle behind most EU ideas, the actual law that gets adopted is usually a far cry from what it should have been. also, this sort of naivety when it comes to the state power is still mind boggling. if you think google is bad, you have no idea.
Of course, they should still be brought to trail or whatever when they are corrupt, but if that doesn't happen, then that is the problem - not that they're not being exposed to public rule.
Well at some point that becomes the only form of justice available. If the state is protecting bad actors what form of justice is left?
However, when the state is protecting bad actors, one should not call for the law to be adjusted to allow for mob justice, but for a functioning judiciary branch.
Now if the EU was just an economic Union like the old EEC this wouldn't be a problem but we are long past that. This was all foreseen by the way but it was expected that the new member states would be uplifted like Spain and Portugal where in the 1970s.
However, that also leaves plenty of room for exploitation, like the stuff you mentioned. I'm sorry to hear the GDPR is being abused this way.
Of course, there's still the problem between the law and its enforcement. But that's often a problem even inside a single country.
>> Such protection should be effectively guaranteed through the introduction, in Union law, of rights related to copyright for the reproduction and making available to the public of press publications in respect of digital uses in order to obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses.
Which makes some sense. If you have a digital version that needs to still give you money but them:
>> In addition, the listing in a search engine should not be considered as fair and proportionate remuneration.
Says you will have to pay in a different from just driving traffic to those ppl.
Now if I’m a Creative Commons news outlet there is no way for me to waive that extra payment. The law states that just listing me somewhere is not enough and I need to be paid in a different way. I may not want that but the law INSISTS that I get paid in a different way.
Does this make it more clear?
I'm not saying the recital 32 is great, and clear and amazing. It's not, but it doesn't mean much until it gets into a draft regulation/directive, gets challenged in court, etc.
"In addition, the listing in a search engine should not be considered as fair and proportionate remuneration."
seems to be specifically targeted at search engines. I'm not sure how this is about a "link tax" more than it is about a "search engine tax". I'm fairly certain we will still be able to share our links on Facebook and Twitter, the embedded excerpts might be in jeopardy though.
>> The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a "link" or a "news story" and implies that an "excerpt" consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).
So it is based on the link and also the main point is to force news outlets to get more money for nothing more than a link which drives traffic to them anyways...
Okay maybe the most correct definition should be: “search engine link tax” from this specific excerpt but it is also left very vague. What’s is a search engine. Is github a search engine? Are links to news articles on GitHub issues the same fate as on google?
So then you go back and think of the potential “search engines” out there and it does start to feel more like a “link tax” because most things can be considered a search engine.
//OFFTOPIC: I mean is anything built with full text search a where clause not close to a search engine (in theory)? Lol
The law is supposed to prevent re-publishing of content with minor attribution ala Google News or this type of thing[0] from Boing Boing. The proposed law states specifically that "the act of hyperlinking" is excluded[1] and even says that "insubstantial parts ... (for instance very short excerpts)" would not be against the law[2].
[0] - https://boingboing.net/2018/09/10/at-insane-speeds-moto2-rid... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_... [2] - http://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2018/...
Is the endgame of these EU laws full vertical integration, so you have one company paying itself, no 'third party cookie' because there's only a first party, etc?
The secrecy is the worst part. Democracies should be about openness. EU is arguably democratic and hardly open.
The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote. If populists like Farage are in the parliament, that's only because people vote for them. Hardly undemocratic.
The EU Council comprises the elected head of government of each member state. Hardly undemocratic.
The EU Commission comprises a president, who is selected by the EU Council and approved or denied by the EU Parliament. The Council also appoints the members of the commission, each country appoints 1 person. In the UK this is no different to the PM appointing ministers.
For this law to pass, not only does the parliament of elected MEPs have to pass it, but so does a majority of the Council, elected leaders.
While it suits heads of various EU governemnts to blame 'the EU', it's entirely in their control to approve or reject the directive, and it's entirely in your MEP's control to approve or reject it.
Depending from which country you are from your vote may weight differently up to a factor of 11 (Luxembourg vs Spain) [1], hardly democratic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_...
I think there is value into rules like these because otherwise smaller states will be always trumped.
Each state is apportioned a number of seats which
approximately corresponds to its share of the aggregate
population of the 50 states.
... The method of equal proportions minimizes the
percentage differences in the populations of the
congressional districts. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...
The UK has a system, widely known as democratic, where the government of the day (with the exception of 2010), does not have the support of the voting population. In 2015 David Cameron and his Tory party got 100% of power in Parliament, and thus 100% of power in the executive, based on 36.9% of the voting public.
The U.S presidential elections are also classed as democratic, despite that twice in the last 20 years more people have voted for a different candidate than the one who became president.
(It's actually worse than 11:1 ratio -- Podlaskie and Warmian-Masurian has 1.3m voters per MEP, Malta has 70,000, that's a 19:1 ratio)
However I've never heard people complain that Malta, Luxemboug, Slovenia, Cyprus etc hold the cards, people always complain it's Germany and the UK that call the shots.
I'm not saying the EU internal negotiations are open to all and wonderful examples of democratic policymaking, but the documents are public (thanks to an EU court ruling).
It not going to be an issue, some newspapers already allow to access to articles for free is you come directly from a search engine.
The part I find troubling is filtering user uploaded content, that's simply not going to work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...
In the end Google said "ok, then we'll stop listing you" and suddenly the publishers that wanted this law gave Google permission to link to them without cost. Sounds okay in theory, but every minor search engine or news aggregator which doesn't have the defacto monopoly of Google still suffers from it.
The insidious thing - a free license can't even be offered under the law. I presume it's meant to preclude both the repeat of the case you mention, and prevent "race to the bottom", i.e., news providers competing with each other on price on resource that has near-zero marginal cost (an article being linked to/snippeted from).
From TFA: >Recital 32 suggests that (1) anyone who wants to link to the news has to have a separate, commercial license;
>and (2) news companies can't waive this right, (...)
But it's the absurdity of the fact that the EU can pass a law which has such massive and widespread implications - where the wording is unclear, bizarre, makes little sense, and can hardly be applied.
Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots.
Whatever it is, it has to be clean, simple, effective, spelled out ... or else there just shouldn't be a law.
Laws are supposed to be readable by everyone, you can't expect everyone to be a tech expert. If you feel like non-experts are "morons" or "idiot", you should take a break and talk to your grand-parents. Explain to them your work field, and you will realize most of the work we do everyday is artificially complex to keep everyone busy. There is actually a tendency for tech people to retain knowledge in order to acquire an advantage and power from the entire society. Tech moves fast, but the rest of us can't follow, it creates inequalities, so here are the regulations.
The laws have to be technically correct, if legislators do not understand the internet it behoves them to hire experts that do.
Can you imagine them writing similar, nonsensical health related laws?
Moreover - the issues are not that complicated, they can be explained in an hour.
They are idiots, and also too lazy to learn trivial, common things.
Don't underestimate the arrogance and entitlement of European legislators: they went to expensive schools, they've mingled with the intelligentsia all of their life - of course they must 'know better' than the common person! (sarcasm).
(Also - the EU is not Europe. It's a terrible habit that some Europeans have of conflating the two)
The legislators who design these laws are not elected, and you have absolutely no ability to influence the direction of these laws. As an EU citizen, you should be more informed as to how this process works legally, but also materially. Legally, there's no relationship between voters, and the Commission designed with writing laws. They are absolutely not elected, and they don't take populist needs into consideration - in fact, it's designed specifically to not be democratic.
The only hope you have might be to have MEP's amend legislation as it passes by, but almost nobody in Europe has an awareness of this process, they don't know who their MEP is, they don't know what they stand for. Can you tell me right now, without looking it up, the name of your MEP and what they represent?
But this is all moot. The legislation is objectively stupid. It makes no sense. It will cause essentially an internet meltdown the likes of which nobody has ever seen. EU legislators are worrying about 'Brexit'? How are you going to live if Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and every other search engine goes black? Or when your newspapers instantly go out of business because the legislation meant to protect them kills them?
The issue of 'democracy' and even 'good intent' are secondary to the fact that the legislation is very materially and very damagingly stupid. This legislation is the equivalent of making chemical weapons in your own home as a 'fun experiment' and then dying from it ...
Even beyond the damage the legislation could do - it makes the Commission look basically incompetent, and it erodes the goodwill that they need to stay alive, as Euroscepticism grows on the continent.
How will the plebes react if even just wikipedia goes black for whatever reason? It would be like the internet version of a 'bread revolt'.
Correct, but all 'designed' laws must be approved by the European Parliament, which is elected.
> Can you tell me right now, without looking it up, the name of your MEP and what they represent?
No, and I don't need to, because I eventually vote for a long-term political view and ideology, not for specific people.
> Or when your newspapers instantly go out of business because the legislation meant to protect them kills them?
You try to install a climate of urgency and fears, which is a tactic from far-right political groups. Building the European Union took times, and it is still being built.
A legislation is not set in stone, it can be changed, by the same system, with adequate discussions and processes.
It is known than the democratic system, with separated powers, is the least worst system of the political systems. So, at the end of the day, I have still more trust in the Commission and Parliament processes to defend my European rights than trust in your alarmist, pessimistic and defeatist opinion.
It's not just the press either, it's the whole cultural industry that they try to save. I'm not a big fan of protectionism but if you look at the French cultural industry for instance (and contrast it with, say, Italy's) we've had some moderate success preserving it through protectionist regulations (quotas, fixed prices for books, regulations regarding advertising of movies etc...). I'm not very happy with that but pragmatically I can't completely dismiss these regulations since they appear to have had a positive effect on the local industry.
I'm not saying this is the right way to go but I'm always a bit frustrated that many on HN seem to lose all sense of measure and intellectual honesty every time government or regulations are mentioned.
I think this "link tax" is a bad thing but at the same time I also see the very real problem the regulators are trying to fix.
In my home country you could trace most news outlets back to a few big players and those tend to be in the top 100 rich people of the country. If they are getting public subventions I would see it more as a way for politicians to keep the coverage positive.
I think there is an earnest attempt to save journalism overall ... but also consider that European industries are static, and especially the press are owned by old, rich families who have considerable influence.
Even this vote on the whole law is hard to find. Personally, I couldn't find it if you didn't post it here.
I wonder what they'll do next. At some point in the future we're going to need a "new internet".
Sites without tracking cookies don't need to show a cookie banner.
In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.
The poison slipped into your morning coffee is also less intrusive than the antidote shot into your arm with a syringe.
> In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.
And thanks to the GDPR, they might make a comeback now.
GDPR is here already and the solution chosen by websites is either the obnoxious banner or blocking Europe. No cookie-less I am afraid...
If a website is obnoxious about its GDPR compliancy, I just close it. Coincidentally, it has never happened on something I really needed (technical documentation, scientific journals, etc.)
I don't necessarily agree with how the GDPR was created, or maybe even why, but to say it's worse than the information tyranny being built in the world today? Pft.
You're confusing "harmful" and "visible".
HN doesn't set tracking cookies, for example. The only two cookies set are the cloudflare uid and a user login cookie, both of which are hardly meant for tracking.
Of course, if you use Google Analytics, you can't guarantee what Google is doing, so you'll need some banner to get consent before you can perform any analytics through GA (which means you need to disable GA until the user agrees, which barely any site does anyway).
If you can guarantee that the analytics won't produce or store personal data, you don't need to disable it or produce a banner.
Even if they did produce personal data, they very likely wouldn't need a banner. For processing personal data you merely need a lawful basis and documented processes, and asking consent is (intentionally) the least attractive lawful basis for using personal data. Consider for example the "legitimate interest" lawful basis:
> processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.
If you're using analytics to, say, optimise accessibility/usability of the site, then it should be fairly straight forward that the legitimate interest of both you and user (of improving the site) outweighs the "privacy harm" of processing that personal data. (Of course, using it for anything else will land you in hot water if you argue this).
Even a 3rd party data processor like Google Analytics would be fine, if they're 1) GDPR compliant and 2) you have a data processing agreement with the provider.
90% of websites who don't do shady things with your personal data should never require any banner or opt-in prompt. The fact that most of the web now does is incompetence, ignorance, intentional annoyance to provoke legislation change, or a mix of these.
There is no escape from GDPR... Bureaucracy at work.
And similar to ads, I expect automated tools to emerge that eliminate most GDPR banners by granting the minimum consent required (optionally alerting the relevant regulator if that's excessively broad) and then revoking it immediately afterwards.
You can't escape bureaucracy, but you can escape the lazy companies who can't think of a better way to deal with bureaucracy than pushing it onto the user.
Ghostery also doesn't report anything. :)
1. people are being taken advantage of 2. law is introduced to make it harder to take advantage of people 3. scummy people still try and take advantage by trying to confuse their users
and now please tell me why i should be on the scummy person side again?
you don't need a cookie notification if you don't serve cookies for other people. and you don't need any GDPR notifications if you are not selling sharing or needlessly storing peoples data.
you are going to websites run by scummy people, that is the problem not the law.
in essence if you are not shitty to people these laws really don't have much impact.
Open content is up to 100 times more popular. It therefore requires up to 100 times less work to satisfy demand. They just cannot let this happen.
This follows from the strange ethic of valuing hard work over efficiency. Labor is sacred. Avoidance of work is considered amoral. Economic output is supposed to be split according to the amount of work done, at least in theory. Any other alternative is considered communist. In order to maintain this moral system, people must be made to work even if the work is useless or subversive.
Did you mean immoral? Amoral means morals being not applicable, immoral means one who flouts morals.
If you check the current proposals (http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-I...) you will find (page 93) that the Council inserted a specific exemption for wikipedia and open source code. That's in addition to a few passages that had already been included previously, and that pretty clearly show that any requirement to collect from people linking to you only applies to large, commercial publishers.
Many people attack this proposal with rather wild interpretations, often of the sort of hair-splitting non-lawyers consider very smart. Those usually just get a tired rolling of the eyes from judges.
Real life is nothing but nuances, yet laws need to be abstract, and provide enough guidance to adequately capture future situations. Since it's impossible to make laws for every individual case (and actually illegal in many jurisdiction), there is no way around some ambiguity in the text. Closing that gap is the fundamental task of judges, and they actually have a pretty good track record of finding equatable outcomes.
It's also worth to consider the problem the EU is trying to solve: journalism has seen its revenue crash by 50% to 75%, with the disappearance not just of readers, but classifieds and advertisers at the same time. Both in Europe and the US, local newspapers will be gone from vast swaths of the country. Those that remain are but shells of what they once were.
Not having some professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session every week means citizen will be effectively cut off from accurate information about politics. Yet if you don't know what is happening, it's is impossible to make decisions in the voting booth. Without this essential loopback, politicians' career prospects become entirely divorced from their actions, rendering democracy meaningless.
This current proposal seems to be far too convoluted, and enough of the fears are credible to make it look like a bad idea to me.
But instead of spinning conspiracy theories of who paid whom, it would (have been) far more effective to try to find some other mechanism to ensure the survival of at least some journalism.
One idea I've been bouncing around for far too many years is an ad blocker that is smart enough to block only ads that are annoying or dangerous. I am quite sure that there's a balance that reduces annoyances by 80% while having far less of an impact on revenue.
If something like this had succeeded in easing some of the economic pressure, it would be far less likely that politicians feel the need to devote their time to such hard-handed measures such as link taxes.
Specifically, it says
> The definition does not include services whose main purpose is not to provide access to copyright protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from this activity. [...] Nor does this definition cover websites which store and provide access to content for non-for-profit purposes, such as online encyclopaedias, scientific or educational repositories or open source software developing platforms which do not store and give access to content for profit making purposes.
Funny because EFF never once mentions Wikipedia in their statement on the problems with this law. So I am not sure why you believe they are "overstating their case" when their case has nothing to do with wikipedia nor open source code.
>>there is no way around some ambiguity in the text. Closing that gap is the fundamental task of judges, and they actually have a pretty good track record of finding equatable outcomes.
I have a feeling we will have massive disagreements on the track record of judges finding equatable outcomes. I could not disagree more this statement
>It's also worth to consider the problem the EU is trying to solve: journalism has seen its revenue crash by 50% to 75%,
It is not the proper role or function of government to protect the profits of any industry, and it is often very dangerous to society when they do.
>Not having some professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session every week means citizen will be effectively cut off from accurate information about politics.
And this law will do nothing about that. Local News reporting has been on a downward spiral LONG before the internet, in fact one of the reasons people have turned to the internet for their news is because most local outlets are garbage. They love to blame everything but their own incompetence for this but at the end of the day they only have themselves to blame not google, reddit, or any other internet site.
>One idea I've been bouncing around for far too many years is an ad blocker that is smart enough to block only ads that are annoying or dangerous.
Annoying is far too subjective to ever be codified into blocking software. The task of blocking on "dangerous" ads while allowing "good" ads is an unsolvable problem, akin to having a computer only run "good code" while blocking "dangerous code"
It would be exponentially more difficult to convince every user not to block all ads, I don't think this is doable.
Instead we should think of how information and misinformation propagates in the era of www as opposed to the era of newspaper and tv. What we need is to keep the public informed, not to prop up a failing business sector.
For one, the www makes it much cheaper to spread targeted misinformation. That didn't happen before.
The promise of the internet was that we wouldn't need this person because we have direct access to the city council session, and it has largely delivered. The tech is there for the city council to make its sessions public. It is transparency that killed the journalist, not google.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me I have just described the job of a journalist.
And you really want to tell me this is no different or definitively better than the last century's news systems? Or even that we understand what impacts the switch to social media will have?
Find a source you know (through research and watching over time) you can trust and read them, whether they publish in Reddit or USAToday. That’s something you can do today that wasn’t really possible before.
you re making a strawman. i wouldn't trust my news from you
Expertise is a perception problem , and perception can easily be gamed. It happens in mainstream media too, but it's harded to measure there than on the internet. I don't think we need to regress back to experts, that's always a power play. Giving people a plurality of opinions works better.
To take an arbitrary example - increasing the age required to obtain an unrestricted motorcycle license.
On the face of it it's not that significant. No-one really cares about this apart from in the abstract. It reduces death rates, and from that perspective it's a good thing.
But there's some small bit of the population that is now pissed off by this, you've told them "wait until you're older", and they don't like that and vote against you.
(It certainly annoyed me at the time despite already having a full licence and already being above the new cut off. No, not enough to vote Leave. I like my citizenship.).
Now multiply that by lots of issues which affect different people.
This is a specific instance of a general class of problems that absolutely did inform the Brexit vote.
How about this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI3R1HAHJBU ?
You don't consider this kind of crap to be one of the reasons why people voted for Brexit?
I voted for Brexit not because of most of the commonly touted but because of the breathtaking arrogance of the EU leaders. If you followed the series of referenda all around Europe regarding the EU's policies, you will see that in almost every instance the popular vote went against the EU, only for member countries politicians to ignore the peoples votes.
Britain is simply a country whose leaders promised to leave the EU if the public voted against it, and as far as we can see they are committed to honouring that promise.
It was the EUs handling of Jorg Haider's party's election victory that decided Brexit for me, ie about 8 or 9 years before the Brexit vote, and FWIW I am not white. Don't assume that all the reasons usually touted were the cause for the vote for Brexit.
I don’t care how well-meaning or reasonable sounding their laws generally are. They clearly don’t have a clue.
The right question isn't "does this organization do crazy things?" but "do the good things outweigh the bad, or the other way around?".
The other thing is that I think a lot of the "EU does crazy things" narrative is deliberately, and dishonestly, pushed by people who are more interested in making the EU look bad than in the truth. (I am not suggesting that sarcasmOrTears is such a person: only that their perception of what the EU does may have been affected by the long-running Make The EU Look Bad campaign.)
That’s what the Magna Carta was about. Also the US revolution.
Magna Carta was about the balance of power between the king and the barons; commoners' interests come into it only incidentally.
The American Revolution is a slightly better case, but note that its "No taxation without representation!" battle-cry wouldn't be any sort of case against the EU because (1) everyone in EU countries does have respresentation, and (2) while for some countries EU membership is a net cost (at least if you ignore the benefits of free trade, free movement, etc.) that cost is a tiny fraction of those countries' total revenue base; e.g., the UK's net contribution is about £8B/year, which is a little over 1% of total UK taxes.