The European Commission is preparing an attack on the hyperlink

https://juliareda.eu/2015/11/ancillary-copyright-2-0-the-european-commission-is-preparing-a-frontal-attack-on-the-hyperlink/

by jsnathan • 11 years ago

421 179 11 years ago

juliareda.eu

mariusz79• 11 years ago

I no longer care.. fuck it. Let them break the internet. We will not be the only one to face the consequences.

I for one, started hoarding data, scraping good websites for valuable information while I still can.

mbrock2• 11 years ago

We should also be preparing the infrastructure for a global network that's asynchronous, anonymous, and encrypted. It doesn't seem all that unlikely that the whole notion of a real-time internet is going to collapse or become infeasible for anything but entertainment approved by the corporations and states. And of course that has already happened to some extent. We should maintain a relatively slow grassroots samizdat network. Even the remotest regions should be able to receive dispatches through couriers, and in regions where packet-switched internet is somewhat operational we can distribute the samizdat at net speeds. I suppose I'm thinking of an "interplanetary" network. A network fit for the Firefly universe, if you will.

jumperjake3• 11 years ago

There already are efforts to address this with projects like the IPFS. However, without mass adoption, it seems very unlikely that an alternative internet would emerge before the increasingly-likely collapse of the open internet.

blazespin• 11 years ago

lol. it wouldn't break the internet. it would just break european websites. I applaud Julia's euro-centric ego though.

I agree though, let them do it. Someone has to show everyone what nonsense this is. Cautionary tales serve a purpose.

philip142au• 11 years ago

It really doesn't matter, I will make my own internet.

joeyspn4• 11 years ago

IPFS, anyone?

https://ipfs.io/

jumperjake3• 11 years ago

I completely support the IPFS (especially with them keeping content hosting explicitly out of scope). The problem I faced when trying to leverage IPFS for a project is that the reference implementation is very difficult to use in languages other than Go, and to completely embed in applications (as in staticly linking to sqlite).

joeyspn4• 11 years ago

I guess it just needs time for maturing: more languages and better UX. If IPFS finally piggybacks on the Ethereum ecosystem it will accelerate considerably this...

ashark• 11 years ago

Yeah, I like Go, but the reference implementation should have been a C library (or similar). There are splinter projects trying to implement it for other languages, but they're either already dead or moving at a snail's pace.

I love the idea, but that decision leaves me with little confidence that it'll catch on.

cJ0th2• 11 years ago

Couldn't EU telcos just block this protocol and declare it a special service (thanks to the new net-neutrality ruling) ?

M2Ys4U2• 11 years ago

No. That's not what "specialised service" means.

chris_wot5• 11 years ago

I would have thought that those in European nations would have learned from their mistakes by now. Spain did this, initially only some companies demanded money and so Google just removed them from the index. Then the companies realised it was a disaster.

Then the Spanish government made it mandatory for everyone to pay the media companies, regardless - and they weren't allowed to do it directly either. They had to pay the state, who then paid the publisher. Nobody was allowed to opt-out. So Google News pulled out entirely. It was an unmitigated disaster... for the publishers:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-s...

To quote that article:

Whatever loss of traffic occurs due to readers who may read a news aggregator and then choose not to read an entire story, is more than made up for by the "market expansion" effect, the study found. In other words, given access to a news aggregator like Google, people read much more news.

The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.

joeyspn4• 11 years ago

The spanish gov bluff lasted a couple of weeks... (until the big media groups realised how bad the profit-loss was)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/12/15/that-was-...

chris_wot5• 11 years ago

Actually, I believe it's still in effect.

Edit: yup, it is:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study...

DominikR3• 11 years ago

But once these plans apply to every single EU state Google will in effect have to choose between leaving the EU market or paying.

That's at least the plan they have come up with.

If they severely limit the Internet in the process doesn't matter to them. They'll create a shitty EU alternative if they have to.

chris_wot5• 11 years ago

If it becomes uneconomic, then that's precisely what Google will have to do. What I suspect will then happen is that news outlets will have to offshore their news distribution to outside of Europe. Ironic, really.

tomp2• 11 years ago

How much do you think Google earns with News? I'm pretty sure they would simply shut down the service EU-wide, and continue providing just their core business, Google Search.

rralian• 11 years ago

I hate to say this, because I'm generally anti- big company. But the major players on the internet need to band together and act collectively. If google, microsoft, facebook, amazon, etc. responded by blocking access, I think the EU would straighten out pretty quickly.

DominikR3• 11 years ago

This is one of the reasons why the IT industry in the EU is so weak when compared to the US.

As a citizen of an EU state I can't help but feel that we are here governed by complete morons.

jstalin• 11 years ago

More regulation begets more regulation. You can't expect bureaucrats who have been given authority over something to sit back and decide when they're done regulating.

wpietri• 11 years ago

I wouldn't totally blame the bureaucrats here, either. They're sort of like sysadmins: people only pay attention to them when something bad is happening, and that attention is rarely positive. Whereas when things are going well, nobody says, "Thank goodness for the bureaucrats that keep things running smoothly."

Their incentives are mostly toward over-regulating. If they over-regulate, they mainly harm invisible potential improvements. Whereas if they under-regulate, the big, obvious failures mean they get in a lot of hot water.

cLeEOGPw• 11 years ago

How are EU regulations holding EU IT industry back?

pvdebbe2• 11 years ago

Regulations by definition are for holding rapidly advancing industries back, for various reasons.

tobltobs9• 11 years ago

E.g. you want to sell digital goods in the EU? Check VAT MOSS. You can't find a EU law which will be a show stopper for you? No problem, there will be a national law which kills your business idea.

mianos• 11 years ago

Because, international companies are going to avoid operating in Europe unless the profit outweighs the burden of stupid laws like this. The start up I work for would not consider expansion in Europe before the USA.

radicalbyte• 11 years ago

My next startup is going to be a digital payments provider which takes the headache out of VAT compliance for EU SMEs.

tluyben2• 11 years ago

It might be one of the reasons but not one of the biggest imho. The risk avoiding nature we seem to have picked up, the shame in failure (bankruptcy in the EU is often a life altering disgrace) and the draw towards comfort, free time and family life over making a billion Euro company seem to be bigger drivers as I see it.

tobltobs9• 11 years ago

Cookie law, VAT MOSS, Abmahnungen and now the Öttinger tax. Even if you don't care about the risk, you would be stupid to found a startup in a EU country.

fsloth4• 11 years ago

All governments protect incumbent players with large enough vested interests - if they yell loud enough. I think you view US through rose tinted glasses - go ask Elon Musk what he thinks of the laws protecting car dealerships there.

quanticle3• 11 years ago

Or what Travis Kalanick thinks of taxi regulations.

walterbell2• 11 years ago

Has any organization formally estimated the worldwide, annual economic value generated by the open internet? When copyright (intended to promote the generation of creative works) is abused for control, the loser is the legitimacy of copyright. Those who want control should invent new mechanisms that are specifically for control, instead of hiding behind and squandering the legitimate role of copyright.

tomp2• 11 years ago

Those who want control should invent new mechanisms that are specifically for control

You mean, DRM, rootkits, hardware TPMs, etc? Personally, I prefer copyright, at least it can be easily ignored.

walterbell2• 11 years ago

The problem is that "technological protection" mechanisms are being bound to copyright, the violation of which is being bound to criminal law in TPP/TTIP/RCEP.

DRM would have an uphill battle if it could not hitch a ride on the legitimacy of copyright. They need to be separated. One protects transient and ever-changing business models, one protects human creativity in a virtuous circle inspired by past creativity.

bitL• 11 years ago

So we need to go through the legalese in detail and make new definitions of slightly modified original concepts so that the law can't be applied to them anymore - like what the pharma industry does with rebranding old medicine by changing the formula slightly. Ideally, that should also be polymorphic in nature, i.e. the definition/implementation could be changed easily algorithmically. Unless there is some radical change to the law making it algorithmic, it would always be trailing a few years behind.

As an EU citizen, it's mind-boggling to see the sheer stupidity of our politicians in the past 2-3 years...

eximius• 11 years ago

Ha! Try being a US citizen! In true 'American style', we are the best at stupid politicians

Retra• 11 years ago

It's really not a competition.

fpp• 11 years ago

I believe it is more incompetence, lack of technology understanding and / or complete ignorance. You can't explain otherwise how a person like Oettinger can be put in charge of such an important part of the economy.

I'm still waiting when they suggest that airline pilots can be replaced with bus drivers to stop them going on strike / industrial action - it's called an Airbus so there shouldn't be much difference, after all it has bus in the name.

SixSigma• 11 years ago

When I worked in air transport we called passenger planes "pressurised buses"

merb• 11 years ago

He is a shame for his country. Never heard a man speaking english so badly when thats his job.

And he never said anything good. He was one of the worst minister of the state i'm living in. Clearly only one guy after him was worse.

He is totally stupid and he and his successor managed it that people started to vote other parties on state votes, after over 50 years the CDU dropped out of the state cabinet.

And now here is the fun fact. Most german politicians inside the EU are politicians nobody wanted in the foreign country. The problem is even if they do completely bad things these politics never needed to fear about any judges against them.

sokoloff• 11 years ago

judges established that the simple act of linking to publicly available content is no copyright infringement, because it does not reach a new public, a few questions were left open bis this ruling, however: For example when exactly content can be seen as accessible by the public and how e.g. links surpassing paywalls are to be treated.

Links surpassing paywalls are a non-issue, IMO. Those coming-from-Google paywall bypasses are put in place by the content copyright holders specifically for the purpose of making that possible. If they didn't want their paywall bypassed, they wouldn't have built (or would turn off) their paywall bypass for search engines.

x5n1• 11 years ago

The end points are 100% under control of the content owner. They are free to decide who to let in and who not to let in. Why should there be any onus on the linker to do anything whatsoever and not exercise their full rights to use hyperlinks any way that they want to?

bpodgursky3• 11 years ago

Maybe before establishing all these EU bureaucracies they should have focused on establishing a strong bill of rights. The first amendment at least in the US would almost certainly prevent nonsense like this.

The EU commissions overall feel like they are flailing around making up the rules they go. At least when courts in the US disagree, it is about adherence to precedent and the constitution, not appeasing whatever group is lobbying them at the time.

pjc502• 11 years ago

* (1) Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

    (2) The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.*

(At first glance it has more caveats, but in practice they're all present in US 1st amendment caselaw as well)

bpodgursky3• 11 years ago

It is not true that these are remotely equivalent. US case-law says, you have freedom of speech unless it specifically calls for violence or threatens very, very, direct harm ie calling "fire" in a theater (and yes, even copyrighted material can be quoted or satirized as necessary to make a political statement).

"For the prevention of disorder of crime, for the protection of health and morals for the protection of the reputation or rights of others" -- those are wide, gaping holes which make this statement absolutely useless.

MichaelGG2• 11 years ago

Would it? ThePirateBay didn't host content, but the US seems to find it highly illegal. Magnet links make it even clearer that hyperlinks are NOT always OK.

pestaa• 11 years ago

Am I the only one who finds these regulations increasingly funny?

I want to see how they would react to URL shortening services, base64-encoded outgoing redirects, links injections only on click events; you know, the gray tactics the whole internet already uses!

Please explain this one thing to me: why don't politicians work with field experts? Not just IT, but any domain, really.

rsync• 11 years ago

I wrote about this 13 years ago during the Les Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corp. court case(s):

http://www.kozubik.com/published/decisions.txt

I went the other way, though - my thought experiment was, what if you came up with a standard way to "say" a URL in plain english. As in, just a wordy, colloquial way to describe the content that is in a URL.

Obviously this would fall under free speech and nobody would consider barring such speech ...

So I think now, as I did then, that if you really want to demonstrate the ridiculous nature of these proposals, you need a browser plug-in that allows you to describe URLs in plain english and then demonstrate that to the court (or whomever).

jahewson• 11 years ago

But most copyrighted works are already in plain English and aren't excluded from copyright because of "free speach", so that argument doesn't add up. You're trying to argue that anything that can be written in plain English can't be subjected to copyright.

andor2• 11 years ago

The government sets an agenda and uses all kinds of tricks to get it through the parliament as fast as possible. A real democratic process is not desired. MPs usually don't have enough time to even read bills, doing proper research is completely out of the question, and therefore they trust the party position. Disagreeing with the party is sanctioned, e.g. you won't get listed in the next election (-> you lose the income you need for your mortgage), less speaking time, etc.

Source: Members of the Bundestag and "Von Rettern und Rebellen" by Klaus-Peter Willsch

pmlnr• 11 years ago

MPs usually don't have enough time to even read bills, doing proper research is completely out of the question, and therefore they trust the party position.

I don't get this. They should automatically reject anything they didn't have time to read.

icebraining• 11 years ago

The law and the courts don't care about the technical implementation; if it works like a link, it's a link. The Pirate Bay defense was much stronger than that, and look at what happened.

kbatten• 11 years ago

I don't know about the EU but in the US politicians to work with field experts, they are called lobbyists. This is why you have the automotive industry writing automotive law, etc.

ohthehugemanate• 11 years ago

I think I've given up on sane legislation with regards to technology.

Not only does technology advance much faster than law, but law makers are almost by definition two generations behind the generation that actually is native to the technological change in question. It's not possible to win in that situation.

You're asking someone whose paradigm of video was formed by the advent of color TV, to understand the cultural and technological consequences of popcorn time. It's like the tech problems of WWI: generals who only knew cavalry rushes continued ordering i calvary rushes, even against machine gun fire and even against staggering numbers of dead.

So I think I give up now. Technological issues may as well ignore the legal framework, because the legal framework ignores the technological issues. If we stop fighting, the rules will get so ridiculous as to he openly impossible to satisfy, offering industries the choice to either ignore them, or go out of business. In the end this stuff doesn't strangle the open sourcers or the hacker culture... It only strangles big industry, the people pay the legislators' paychecks. So fuck em. Legislators can figure it out when it hits their tax receipts.

tobltobs9• 11 years ago

"It only strangles big industry" Actually it helps the big industry as the small business owner are struggling. For example the VAT MOSS rule. Amazon, Google or Apple will not have any problem to fulfill this law. A small company selling software to EU customer will not be able to handle the bureaucratic effort.

oh_sigh• 11 years ago

Will cheap services pop up which help small companies fulfill MOSS requirements while not being an onerous burden?

Jormundir• 11 years ago

You're right about the outcomes, but ignoring the laws would disproportionately hurt small businesses and the open sourcers and hackers you talk about.

Laws are tools paid for and created by large entities to cement their positions. Ignoring laws means giving ridiculously powerful legal tools to big companies and governments to prosecute the smaller groups who can't defend themselves.

fijal• 11 years ago

No, mostly business. Those things are typically not criminal so as far as open source goes for the sake of open source, it's easy to ignore

specialist• 11 years ago

I choose to be an optimist. Codification takes time. Patience.

IANAL, so my understanding is naive (at best): law is about striking a balance.

So long as technological progress continues to rearrange society, it'll be a while before things settle down, thereby giving people sufficient time and experience figure out a new acceptable balance.

I probably misremember (or just made up) this factoid: It took Roman's 400 years to codify their laws. So I think we're doing pretty good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codification_(law)

oneJob2• 11 years ago

Finally! An opportunity to say something positive about representative democracies! The opportunities to do so are rather meager these days, it seems, what with all the talk about their failings and lackings, especially when compared to direct democracy, which is becoming more and more possible every day. This is a tailor made case for representative democracy.

To all the comments speaking to the shortcomings of their legislators and how those shortcomings translate to suboptimal or even outright harmful laws, please consider two other options. Direct democracy and laissez-faire /libertarianism /anarchy.

First, consider direct democracy. By opening the legislative process to every eligible citizen, there is little chance the voting base will become more knowledgeable as to the issues of technology it will be voting on. It will in all probability become less knowledgeable, on par. Direct democracy increases the cognitive load on the legislator by orders of magnitude. By not having professional legislators each citizen must become, in addition to already being a productive member of the work force keeping their skills sharp and keeping abreast of advancements in their field, being a responsible, good member of their social circles, oh, and having a personal life, they must now both make decisions as to when they should devote resources to their legislative duties, given there will always be something up for vote, they must also devote resources deciding how they will vote. So, direct democracy not only creates a larger pool of non expert technology legislators but it also creates a framework in which those new legislators are less capable to devote the appropriate resources to legislate effectively.

Now consider the laissez-faire case. This one is easy, and for a contemporary case study one just needs to look at the recently drafted TPP language on restrictions on States regarding OSS. Laissez-faire simply settles in whatever state is conducive to the capabilities and sensibilities of the most fit entity given the initial state of the environment and its constituents. If the environment is most conducive to an entity which is benevolent and intelligent, awesome. If it is conducive to the successful outcome of a self interested, profit motive driven entity, awesome or not, that is the outcome in that case. It is amoral. No judgement. Just outcome.

The case for representative democracy then follows rather nicely, for once. Representative democracy creates a specialized space for crafting legislation where the citizens concerned about a given piece of legislation can appeal to the legislators to devote more resources to that particular issue, over other issues. Additionally they can provide additional resources to the legislators on a case by case basis to help them legislate, which may come in the form of financial assistance, access to relevant case or field studies, or experts in the domain. The non legislative citizens can then still go on about their lives, and the legislators can craft better quality legislation. Lobbying would be a form of this activity, but one in which the non legislative party is already decided as to how the legislation should look in its finished form, rather than simply trying to inform better legislation.

Two other benefits of representative democracy. The process inserts safety-switches in the form of, for example, checks and balances (only possible when the legislature is split in to different bodies, does not work when the whole legisture is involved in every part of the process), vetoes and recalls (same thing here), or the formalized process itself, which might require drafting, review, certification, or cooling-off/reflection periods.

All of which I mention to say that, sure, our "legislators" proper have had some pretty dumb moments recently while discharging their duties, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. They are only a small part of our law making apparatus. Lobbyists have certainly been providing their full energy. The process itself, while never perfect, has certainly done well for its constituents over an extended historical period, especially compared to other experiments; part of the beauty of the currently implemented process is its ability to improve and broaden the scope of its constituency, which should certainly continue. And there are some examples of grass roots activity influencing the dialogue and end-product.

As technology experts, throwing our support and resources behind the entire process, in a holistic fashion, providing expertise, opening up operations to legislators and citizens so they can familiarize themselves with often mysterious domains, providing a forumn for dialogues surrounding the issues, etc, this, to me at least, seems like a promising way forward, as opposed to withdrawing from the process all together and assuming everthing will sort itself out to one's personal liking. Not every issue will be settled in a manner that will satisfy each citizen every time. But that is the trade off one makes for being part of a larger community which shares most, but not necessarily each of their interests and priorities with the other members of their community. On balance though, we should all be better off if everyone engages and basic rights are respected.

So, yeah, call you Senator or Representative today. :)

tobltobs9• 11 years ago

The problem is not Direct democracy or laissez-faire. The problem is that EU laws are made by lobbyist.

undefined05• 11 years ago

Pure direct democracy, sure. But Switzerland is has a 'pause' from when the referendum collects signatures to when it actually happens. This gives the 'hive-mind' time to calm and to think more rationally over emotionally. Also, the requirement to physically go to the voting stations acts as a good disincentive for internet viral uproar as they can't make snap decisions. Although, some Cantons are moving towards vote-by-post, but that's still not as bad as what internet voting would be.

IMO, direct democracy to throw out laws and to also get the government to NOT do something (ie: invade a country) I'm in favor for. Though, direct democracy to vote through laws would require stronger restrictions (the law has to be drafted by elected politicians, for example).

But we do need some form of direct democracy because politicians are easily paid for and certainly don't represent the population (at least, here, in the UK).

nickbauman2• 11 years ago

No market (as libertarians understand markets) has ever emerged in all of history the way libertarians believe they do. All markets emerge in the context of state actors, the earliest being warlords that capture gold and silver, strike coin with their visage to pay their soldiers and demand the peasantry to pay taxes in said coin. Markets follow directly from that. They require states to function for no other reason to have police protection over transactions. When you have too much control from a police state, markets suffer. When you have too little, markets suffer (or melt away actually). You will have to do better than this.

BurningFrog• 11 years ago

Another problem is that when the legal system first encounters new technology, and is the most ignorant and unprepared for it, it makes that decision a "precedent" that later cases are expected to follow.

fsloth4• 11 years ago

Laws are lobbied by industries. In the end it will be the combined interest of several industries, not technologists, who settle this.

"It only strangles big industry..."

No, big industry will say how they would prefer this to roll. Currently the publishing houses seem to hold the upper hand. Industry players percieve this as a way to funnel Google and Facebook profits to dying industries in europe. Instead of innovating the publishing houses fight death through supportive legislation.

jonesb6• 11 years ago

While I agree with your point, the history buff in me has to point out that the WWI metaphor was inaccurate. World War One was a war of scale that was exponentially larger then previous conflicts. Tactics advanced rapidly and beyond 1914/1915 generals had adapted themselves in a myriad of ways.

The largest example of this however was away from the battlefield. As Napoleon Bonaparte said "An army runs on its stomach", and the explosion of modern military logistics that took place in WWI was nothing short of miraculous. Millions of men, food, supplies, armaments, had to be shuffled back and forth from France, to Russia, and back to France again, in ways that had never been conceived before.

One reason I believe this rapid advancement was possible was because leaders were CONSTANTLY replaced if their performance suffered. This forced new, and occasionally younger (but mostly old), officers to adapt or quickly lose their rank.

I think this yields some hope in modern times, we don't necessarily need better representatives, just new ones, constantly, until they get it right.

commandar• 11 years ago

Millions of men, food, supplies, armaments, had to be shuffled back and forth from France, to Russia, and back to France again, in ways that had never been conceived before.

And not only that, but the bulk of it was still being done with horse and carriages.

vanilla-almond• 11 years ago

"law makers are almost by definition two generations behind the generation that actually is native to the technological change in question"

This 1 min video clip from a UK comedy show is over 30 years old. But it captures this sentiment perfectly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VgwxKW0J6I

quanticle3• 11 years ago

In the end this stuff doesn't strangle the open sourcers or the hacker culture... It only strangles big industry, the people pay the legislators' paychecks.

Actually, you have it exactly backwards. Big corporation have teams of lawyers that will allow them to navigate this legal thicket. But your average open-source project, or blog? The first scary legal letter they get, asking for a six-to-seven figure amount for copyright infringement, will cause them to shut down. As far as I can tell, this law is a huge threat to any free-speech that threatens corporate interests, because the moment you link to the thing you're criticizing, you can be sued for thousands to millions, depending on how many people (allegedly) clicked.

Under this legal regime, making it to the front page of Hacker News would be a literal kiss of death to almost organization that offends corporate interests. Maybe the EFF could handle the legal wrangling to prove that its links were "fair use", or whatever. Precious few others would be able to.

Silhouette6• 11 years ago

Under this legal regime, making it to the front page of Hacker News would be a literal kiss of death to almost organization that offends corporate interests.

Perhaps I've misunderstood, but it seems to me that under this legal regime, an organization that offends corporate interests making it to the front page of HN would be the kiss of death to HN. The danger is that the mere act of linking to something controversial becomes guilt by association, and since in general someone who links to another site doesn't control the content on that other site, anyone can become guilty of whatever crimes result literally without having done anything wrong (beyond not constantly legally reviewing the content of every site they link to and removing links in real time in the event of any potential problem).

jjuhl• 11 years ago

This is so broken.

I'm giving up. The political system is broken beyond repair.

Kristine1975• 11 years ago

There's a lot of "considering" and "seems" in the article, and skimming the leaked document I didn't find anything definite either. So I'm not particulary worried.

mcs_• 11 years ago

when was internet free? i always have paid to use it. i understand free software but internet is here cause an infrastructure was created and deployed (means paid). my lan is free (cause i paid for that).

i don't get the point. someone wants to control a wan. is that a news?

andor2• 11 years ago

"the simple act of linking to publicly available content is no copyright infringement, because it does not reach a new public"

That's not really the most straight forward reasoning? I'd say linking is not COPYright infringement because nothing is ever copied.

dclowd9901• 11 years ago

Since democracy seems incapable of progressing with changes in the world, would it ever be possible to have a bureaucratic technocracy? Something where technocrats write up and implement legislation rather than people who have no understanding?

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

Technocracy seems to be as much of a myth as meritocracy. How do you decide who is actually an expert in their field? And they are still completely undemocratic.

fsloth4• 11 years ago

Um, it's not democracy that's at fault. Legislative structures first goal is to protect capital. In practice this leads to lobbyists influencing legal decisions.

In the fantasy technocracy - unless it was totalitarian communism - there would be instruments to sound the markets for need for legislation and big capital would have as much say so there as here now.

tetheno• 11 years ago

"And it's clear: When, like that, the number of subscribers dramatically declines, young people no longer subscribe to newspapers as my generation did, when the number of papers sold at newsstands declines, when the classified ads for the labour market, for used cars and for apartments decline because it all becomes an online service then newspapers are in existential danger. One can either accept that, or act now – in five years it would be too late."

I say, let them die. Most newspapers are a joke. I don't subscribe to them because it's actually a way to become misinformed about any specific topic. Or at least that's what I see in their take of any topic I know profoundly.

There are alternatives. Reader-supported news like LWN seem to be working. I get most of my content from topic specific websites, blogs, and mail lists.

About the classified ads. Why is that a problem at all?

"Maybe Google will only accept an European provision, accept European instruments because then, if needed, via the competition law and the European Commissioner for Competition measures, penalties and legal action in case of breach of European rules are possible"

Transcription -> Steal.

mtgx• 11 years ago

Take Ottinger out of the Commission, and this idea will die. He was the one pushing for such a tax in Germany, too. He has strong ties with GEMA there.

5ersi• 11 years ago

Will this also way the other way around ? I.e. will newspapers also need to pay if they link to external source?

dreamdu5t• 11 years ago

Hyperlinks are not a problem. Government is a problem. The EA and it's legislators are a problem.

sacado2• 11 years ago

A hyperlink is the same as a reference in a book. That means referencing a precise portion of a book (for instance, ISBN + page number, or just title + publisher + chapter number) would become a copyright violation too.

I'm not sure the EC is conscious of that, because it would have huge consequences. The cost of academic research papers, for instance, with their pages full of references, would become dramatically high to produce, or even impossible (what if I don't want you to talk about my works ?)

ryanmarsh• 11 years ago

I'd like to know how many of the people complaining here about their legislators have called, written, or visited* (yes you can do that) said legislators to help educate them.

*In the U.S.

chejazi• 11 years ago

Silly for digital media to try and leech off of the more successful tech cos. In general, digital media is scrambling with various monetization strategies. But they're thinking about the problem wrong. They obsess over how to monetize people already on their site. Instead, they should start asking how they can monetize people coming to their site. I think the proposition linked by OP is a very premature recognition of that. The proposed solution is way out in left field, but there are saner approaches, such as the use of interstitial advertising. Of course, now adblockers become relevant to the discussion, and I won't go down that rabbit hole (here, at least.)

Disclosure: I operate a link shortener [1] that pays people based on their traffic using interstitial advertising.

[1] https://credhot.com

alkonaut2• 11 years ago

I don't understand. Help me. Why do you even PUT content at a linkable url online if you don't want anyone linking to it?

If I wanted to control exactly who views my content and where they come from I can just check headers for internal linking or generate unique single-use URLs for each visitor.

What is the practical scenario that this legislation aims to cover?

kalleboo2• 11 years ago

What is the practical scenario that this legislation aims to cover?

Newspapers want Google to give them money

alkonaut2• 11 years ago

Or else what? Or they will stop being indexed by Google? Why would they want that? It makes no sense!

endymi0n• 11 years ago

And another strike by the same EU Digital Economy commissioner (!) that "had no sympathy for Jennifer Lawrence when she happens to post her private pictures online".

I'm pretty hopeless, especially because there's no way on gods green earth to get rid of this guy. EU is so high above country level politics (yet defines >80% of laws in the end), it's hard to even get people to the voting booth. And even if they do, it's completely parliamentary, no chance to influence anything.

It doesn't help that completely incompetent politicians in the country parties get dilbertized one level up so they "can't hurt anymore". This pirate politician is about the only one there decently transparent and accountable.

Radle• 11 years ago

Any fellow Europeans here, who remember the good old time, when we used to make jokes about American Politics being so stupid?

I feel sad, very sad.

mikerichards• 11 years ago

When you have a culture of statism this is what you get. You elect governments that want to and do micromanage your lives.

Don't blame it on the politicians. You guys elected these people. They're just following the ideology of their politics.

alexro• 11 years ago

Don't you think that the whole 'democracy' model is flawed from the top to the bottom? If there were no good candidates offered to the public, how would the public choose a good one? And if a good one would somehow emerge, it is trivial to 'catch him' with a pack of heroin or being related to 'enemies', isn't it?

Joeri• 11 years ago

Time to play devil's advocate and do a thought experiment. What if we created a site containing every word and every conjugation in a way that could be linked to. This work is clearly not a copyright violation. What if we then wrote a "compression" program that took any text file and converted it to a file containing only links to this site. Few would argue that is not a copyright violation. Yet the resulting file contains nothing of the original, it is just a link. If linking to a whole text with a single link is not a copyright violation, at what point between that and our "compressed" file does it cross the line, and why?

Or, put another way, if links had been copyright violations from the start, would we think that it was a sensible and logical characteristic of copyright?

waxjar2• 11 years ago

That experiment has been done before! https://github.com/philipl/pifs

sonthonax2• 11 years ago

What is the legal implication of distributing a range of Pii that can be translated into copyrighted material?

spc476• 11 years ago

Because governments and large corporations want colored (or coloured) bits. (http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

rubiquity• 11 years ago

I think it's a great idea because those media companies will get crippled when everyone stops linking to them. What a great way to put a serious dent in an annoying industry.

waxjar2• 11 years ago

When I lock my front door and leave a spare key under the doormat, my insurance company is not obliged by law to pay for any damages if the spare key is used by thieves to enter my house. I could have easily prevented the situation.

Content publishers should properly lock their front doors, too, and not have spare keys lying around all over the place.

ikeboy• 11 years ago

Remember all these sites that ban hyperlinking to them in their ToS:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Hyperlinking+to+the+Site+fro...

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

Let it pass. Let these nimwits embarrass themselves.

fried_chicken• 11 years ago

Just let them pass the legislation. Any media company actually trying to enforce their "rights" will promptly die.

henrikschroder• 11 years ago

If you are a EU citizen, vote pirate in the EU elections.

We got Christian Engström last term, and we have Julia Reda this term. They're doing a ton of good. We need more.

kalleboo2• 11 years ago

Why are tech companies so bad at lobbying? If a small, dying industry like publishing is strong enough to push through stuff like this, why can't cash-flush tech companies combat it?

scotty79• 11 years ago

Internet already has this. If you want to be paid by google for linking to your site you just need to put NOINDEX in proper place in the page header. Though it's really up to google if they choose to list you and pay you or not list you.

Amarandei• 11 years ago

What exactly makes a text a hyperlink?

Does it have to be only the usual <a href="#">text</a> ?

What if I do this: <div link="#">text</div>

And then I use JavaScript to redirect, is it still considered a hyperlink?

Have I just found a loop hole? :)

The European Commission is preparing an attack on the hyperlink

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