Disagree. The law ensures there are Canadian media, which can be used to push media to the betterment of Canadians.
Many countries have protectionist laws and this isn’t much different.
Many countries have protectionist laws and this isn’t much different.
I don't think that preserving Canadian culture is a factor in any of this, nor does it seem to be a concern of the current government.
These same politicians have been bringing in an absolutely staggering number of foreigners each year for many years now, with most of them from cultures that are extremely dissimilar from, if not outright incompatible with, what was Canadian culture.
Yet the government is passing even more laws to try to give them cash grabs. These companies should be broken apart and the spectrum sold off to smaller players. Canadians need more competition in both media and wireless / internet access, not less.
And just like other protectionist laws, this is a dumb idea and is going to end up hurting consumers.
Canada appeared to be attempting to emulate countries like Australia, Spain, France, etc that have passed very similar laws. It seems like the tech giants were perfectly happy to just cut ties with Canadian media rather than make a deal however.
Imagine if I recommended you to watch a show on Netflix and I had to pay to give that recommendation. It makes absolutely no sense.
that it, or any portion of it, is reproduced; and
that access to it is facilitated by “any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.”Just linking does not satisfy the first part of the clause according to the bill.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37029066
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I think that's ambiguous enough to be problematic. For example, does a slug (headline-with-hyphens-in-it) count? If so, links often do. What about the headline? And what if a user copies a paragraph into their post?
"Any portion" is language that gives away that this is intended to be read pretty broadly. There's no qualifier, no "significant" or "substantial". If the goal were to prevent the kind of abuse that your bus driver analogy suggests, they should have been more specific.
'Making available of news content (2) For the purposes of this Act, news content is made available if
(a) the news content, or any portion of it, is reproduced; or
(b) access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.'
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-18/royal-a...
https://lop.parl.ca/staticfiles/PublicWebsite/Home/ResearchP...
Obviously this is entirely beneficial for the news source for this to be shown - this bill is like trying to go after people for copyright infringement for showing somebody a movie trailer (since the movie trailer contains "any portion" of the full feature film).
The underpinning concept in HTML is:
My document can link to your document without asking, and without cost.
This whole, if you send traffic to me you have to pay me for it is backwards.