Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites | Hacker News Reader

Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites

faduda.ie

68 pointsirishstu27 comments

I think the issue of it being a charity is irrelevant and shouldn't be an issue at all. I don't want to see charities "allowed" to link to others and everyone else not allowed.

This is just links. How does the World Wide Web work without linking? It doesn't.

What is the current legal status of linking? In the past it's been considered fair use.

The Belgian Google case mentioned elsewhere here was one where they were upset over the caching, text excerpts and thumbnail photos and not the raw links. At least there, there is a question to evaluate if it is fair use or not.

If referencing articles through hyperlinks is determined to be a copyright violation, then it is also a copyright violation to cite sources in the footnotes of an academic paper.

I'm wondering if it were okay for Newspaper Licensing Ireland to write "cf. yesterday's paper, first article on page 8" without obtaining a license. If so, linking should be okay, too.

In Belgium the newspapers won a case against Google linking and quoting their papers in Google News[1]. Of course it didn't work out that well[2].

I'm not saying it is right, nor sensible, but Irish law isn't US law (having said that under Australian law - which is fairly closely related to Irish law - this wouldn't be legal.)

[1] http://hyperom.com/2011/07/16/belgian-newspapers-sued-google...

[2] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110718/16394915157/belgia...

The NLA in the UK is doing exactly the same thing.

I can't believe the stupidity of this. Basically Newspapers are giving these 'companies' the right to extort money from anyone who links to their news website.

The high court has assured that individuals do not count and scraping from free services like Google Alerts is ok.

However if you do it in work for a company bigger than 7 people you can be a legitimate target for litigation.

Well the loss of links is going to slap them down the rankings for news stories and their websites overall as anyone with links to their site will have to remove them. Shooting in foot with a shotgun comes to mind.

There is also a case under litigation in the UK and is still unresolved..

If you work for a newspaper make sure your editor understands that the end effect if this jokery continues is that your newspaper website (that you're spending a lot of money on) will plummet in the search engines as people rush in droves to remove links.

Link to the UK NLA debacle. http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7826-nla-v-meltwater-are-mil...

A reply has been sent to Women's Aid from Newspaper Licensing Ltd: http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2012/05/24/reply-received-fro...

I recommend following @Tupp_Ed (Simon McGarr) on twitter as he's very involved in copyright issues in Ireland. He previously came to fame when the Irish Minister of State for Research and Innovation refused to participate in a debate on the Irish equivalent to SOPA unless Simon stepped down from the panel.

The reply is brilliant, and is an example of a lawyer calling them on their nonsense:

"> “a licence is required to link directly to an online article even without uploading any of the content directly onto your own website”.

We would be grateful if you would specify the statutory basis of this claim by return of post."

Basically "I don't think that's the law, please tell us the law. Oh you can't find it?"

There's a lot of greed in copyright, and there's a lot of stupidity, but this is an example of both combined in one place. What kind of colossal misunderstanding does it take to confuse linking and copying?

I don't believe they misunderstand, though they may be greedy and stupid. They just want people to pay for the privilege of linking to their articles.

If I'm ever in need of legal help in Dublin, I'm definitely picking those guys.

Essentially a ruling in favour of this will cripple traffic to the sites of the companies suing, which means they'll lose money and potentially put themselves out of business. Another contender for this weeks Business Darwin Awards.

That it is a charity is neither here nor there - regardless of the linking issue (which, IMHO, is silly, the point of the web is linking!) that's an attempt by the writer to cloud the issue by making an appeal to emotion.

It's stupid behaviour to do it in the first place, and shitty behaviour to do it to a charity.

The writer is mentioning the charity, because this case involves that charity. What do you suggest as an alternative?

You could remove all mention of charity for issues involving charities, just to make sure that no-one is being emotionally manipulated by the fact that charities exist, but then articles about things happening to charities would start to resemble redacted missives from some government ministry of truth.

I didn't think it was possible to sue or charge someone for linking to a specific website. It would be like banning someone from saying where they heard about a story. "I read about it in the Times, page 25."

It doesn't make sense at all. The SEO guy for the paper will probably hold their head in their hands when they discover the site they are trying to promote is taking legal action against anyone who links to it.

What a joke, this is all getting absolutely out of hand. It genuinely worries me not that the internet gets totally locked down, just that something I love is being proved lawless by the very people who are complaining about lawbreaking. Copyright stake holders are making the web a worse place at all spectrums of "infringement".

Charity Comms in the UK are trying to stop just this sort of thing happening, focusing more on print articles, but probably not long before linking comes in:

http://charitycomms.org.uk/resources/guidelines/charity_medi...

Linking is an inherent part of the web, and publishing on the web means having links to your content. This is like asking somebody to pay for mentioning the name of your book in a reading list.

A few years ago, there was a similar case in Germany. IIRC, it got rejected by the judge for being totally stupid.

If a newspaper doesn't want an incoming link, why don't they just block traffic that comes from a referring site? They could whitelist the sites that have paid the appropriate fee, and every other link redirects to some page claiming the link was "illegal."

Er - so there is a fair use defence for using short quotations from articles, but linking to the source so that the reader can see the whole context of the quote may be a copyright infringement? Sounds really sensible to me.

Fair use doesn't exist in EU. There are certain provisions of copying allowed for research and a few select reasons but its much more restrictive than the US.

So if they had used quotes from the article they could genuinely be in trouble.

> Fair use doesn't exist in EU.

This matter is country-level, internal to Ireland. In Ireland, they have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing See, for example, notes here http://www.poetryireland.ie/resources/copyright.html under ``Reproducing copyrighted material'', which mentions a citation of 5% of magazine article falls under Fair Dealing protection.

I don't know whether there's EU-wide fair use, but there seems to be in member countries. For example, in my home Poland, we have http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dozwolony_użytek

"Fair use" is a USA copyright idea. In Ireland (& UK) there is a weaker "fair dealing".

Annoying the US constitution is nicer about copyright, since it says that copyright is explicitly for limited time, and that it's to benefit the arts & sciences. Whereas the European Charter of Fundamental Freedoms (which was only enacted recently), just states that "Intellectual property shall be respected". No limits, no purposes. ☹

Do Irish news organisations link from articles on their sites to content out on the net? What sort of license/permission do they obtain before linking to Youtube, a blog, etc?

Since there's no details in the article at all, I'm going to guess that the charity was hotlinking content from the archive's servers into the middle of their own webpage. This is generally bad manners on the internet.

I wouldn't guess that. The newspaper industry is pretty well known for malarkey like this. A few years back the American newspaper industry famously accused Google of ripping them off by including their stories in its SERPs without paying them.

A couple of references:

http://searchengineland.com/google-testifies-before-senate-a...

http://searchengineland.com/would-someone-please-explain-to-...

I could actually understand that, since Google actually copied their text and was selling ads next to the copied text.

Not really. Iff the newspaper allowed it in its robots.txt, Google would copy the page title and a short description of the page. This is the same thing every search engine does with every page on the Internet. Google did not copy the actual articles and sell ads next to them. The newspapers' Web teams even knew their publishers were talking crap, which is why they didn't just delist themselves and stop complaining about it.

(Full disclosure: I work on newspaper sites. I was actually one of the people who had to have the "Well, we could opt out" "BUT THEN WE'D LOSE ALL OUR TRAFFIC!" conversation.)

Do they also sue people for word-of-mouth referrals?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com