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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Your analogy would only make sense if the bill were only trying to tax including all or part of a news article on Facebook/Google. It sounds like instead any link would be taxable, so it would be more like the bus driver having to pay the cinema for the privilege of driving you there.

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"Clause 2(2) stipulates that news content is “made available” if two conditions are met:

    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.

Edit: mannerheim points out that OP is quoting from an outdated version of the bill, and the final version is much worse. I'm going to leave my original reply because I think my objection is also valid, but mannerheim's point is more important:

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.

I see an 'or', not an 'and'.

'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...

There's definitely a discrepancy in the various documents

https://lop.parl.ca/staticfiles/PublicWebsite/Home/ResearchP...

Your link is October 2022. Mine is the final version that was assented to on June 22, 2023.

'Any portion' seems very much key (although the final version of the law is apparently even worse). Sites linking (that is, driving free traffic to a news website) often include the time and a one sentence or so (or even just a truncated sentence with ellipsis) so people know what they're clicking on. Sometimes a low-res thumbnail from the meta info.

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).

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