7 ms·

I had not realized that this insane bit with an inalienable right to monetary remuneration had made it to the drafts. We already know from the past cases that i

by jsnell 8y ago

I had not realized that this insane bit with an inalienable right to monetary remuneration had made it to the drafts. We already know from the past cases that if given the choices between paying for the privilege of linking vs. not linking at all, search engines and social networks will do the latter. The economic value of e.g. news searches must be miniscule. But maybe there is a little bit of value there, even if not a ton. So one can maybe imagine a Google or a Facebook signing a deal with a couple of publishers per country. It's just that the marginal utility of additional publications will go down very quickly. Most publications will a) not get paid for the links, since they're not linked to b) not get any traffic, and lose a large chunk of their ad revenue as well. It absolutely boggles the mind that anyone would think this is a good idea. Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off.

merinowool 8y ago
This makes perfect sense for socialist regime - keep few large outlets that you can control easily. It really boggles my mind that people believe EU has any good intentions. They aim for total control of every aspect of ones live.
- mrlatinos 8y ago
  Bingo.
- joejerryronnie 8y ago
  At least China is upfront and honest about their push toward techno-totalitarianism.
- whataretensors 8y ago
  I don't necessarily agree but the immediate downvotes anyone receives for questioning the EU's pure intentions is interesting. People are either extremely trusting of huge global governments or we're being brigaded.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I didn't downvote, but the part I object to is the socialist moniker, not the questioning of their motives.
  - merinowool 8y ago
    I rarely comment on EU because of that. It seems like EU has its own brigade of "Brussel trolls"
- pacnard 8y ago
  I think there are EU paid shills on HackerNews now. They do exist. I've also noticed they downvote anti-EU post en masse after they've been posted for some time (I have multiple throwaway). Sorry for the tin foil, but it's not normal that when a post is anti-EU it gets upvoted at first and then it suddently falls into oblivion in a short amount of time, like someone suddently noticed. That's not a normal pattern for upvotes/downvotes on these kind of boards. Honestly it's sad that ycombinators, and many other private companies, have to deal with State-paid actors that influence discussions on their boards. I'm also not really happy I have to write such inflamatory posts, but while I know I don't have proof I can't stop myself in revealing what I suspect. In any case we're reaching another point in history where we will soon have to fight for basic human rights in western countries. And when these times come it means that as there are victims there are persecutors. Good times ahead.
  - xevb3k 8y ago
    There’s no karma level that allows users to downvote articles according to the unofficial hackernews faq. It’s possible that the admins downweight the articles because politics in general is frowned upon? I don’t think you really have much proof on pro-EU state sponsored sock puppets... but a more detailed analysis would be interesting!
    - pacnard 8y ago
      I am talking about comments. Of course I can be wrong about this situation since it's basically gut feeling and perceptions. Still, aside from the votes, there have been some really weird comments in this thread too, something that just doesn't feel it can align with how a programmer or entreprenur would express himself. Sorry if I'm sharing my emotions.
      - ACow_Adonis 8y ago
        I've said it in other threads and I'll say it again: programmers and entrepreneurs are far more than silicon valley, advertising companies, and ad supported websites. Part of the reason may be the myopia of a certain type of programmer in not realising they are possibly the minority. As an aside, each time I post a comment like this, my karma goes up and down like a yo-yo for 24 hours :p
TAForObvReasons 8y ago
It's absolutely insane that freebooting [1] on Facebook was allowed to persist for so long. It's easy to see the right to monetary remuneration as a method of addressing a massive loophole exploited by Facebook and certain users for years. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA
raverbashing 8y ago
Yeah, it's absurd. > Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off. Maybe that's the idea, but I think it's shooting yourself in the foot, even then.
- bluelu 8y ago
  It's even worse. Everyone who you link to has the right to claim damages(in case they are press). So you will have to be careful who you link to since a single link could already fall into the new legislation depending on the member state.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    Does anyone know how this "press" is defined in the proposal? More and more legal entities (governments, companies,...) seem to be moving to actively blurring lines so as to induce fines and damages. Suppose instead the proposal mandated any content hoster (press or not) to include a <linktax> tag so that hosting software can be configured to suppress the inclusion of links to pages that contain the tag. Without such an explicit tag, the situation will end up similar to ad blockers, with random distributed lists of sources that would probably qualify as "press"
    - c3o 8y ago
      In the Commission proposal: "‘press publication’ means a fixation of a collection of literary works of a journalistic nature, which may also comprise other works or subject-matter and constitutes an individual item within a periodical or regularly-updated publication under a single title, such as a newspaper or a general or special interest magazine, having the purpose of providing information related to news or other topics and published in any media under the initiative, editorial responsibility and control of a service provider."
      - DoctorOetker 8y ago
        Thank you very much for looking it up! The 'definition' is exactly as vague as I feared it to be: Consider a blog, one could easily argue that it is a (samizdat) press publication, the blog has a name or title, is regularly updated, provides information to news or other topics and is published as a medium (everything on the web is published in the medium of HTML, PDF, ...) under the initiative, editorial responsibility and control of the "service provider" of whomever maintains the blog. The same can be argued for any website, forum, government webpage (so we can't even safely link to government pages without exposing oneself to the risk of a fine!) If the goal was not to expose normal daily citizen activity to the risk of fines, then they should simply require "press publications" to self-declare themselves to be such by means of a <linktax> tag, or perhaps even better, by having those providers who WISH to be freely linked to provide a <linkpermission> tag containing a cryptographic signature endorsing free circulation, such that upload filters can verify without users having to rely on decentralized lists of educated guesses of who would or would not sue for linking freely...
yummybear 8y ago
I can imagine websites refusing to link and instead displays the URL so the user can enter it themselves. A lot of new companies will pop up offering their LINKTAX compliant packages that offer automatic downgrading of off-site links to user-selectable link fields, some even with custom functionality to automatically place the link in the clipboard. Tech savvy users will use adblockers to disable this auto-delinking script. All uploads will go through the few behemoths of media that can implement the upload filtering, like YouTube. User uploaded profile images will be substituted for generated images by the website. Uploaded text content such as comments will be disabled for all but the websites that live off them. Get used to seeing "Your comment is not currently visible, but awaiting moderation". What a miserable, sad web...
- kd5bjo 8y ago
  It's not the link that's being taxed, but the short excerpt that's being displayed. If a website writes its own summary instead of taking a snippet directly from the article, there shouldn't be any fee.
  - dazc 8y ago
    Isn't that what the meta description is for?
  - hessenwolf 8y ago
    Those auto-summary bots on reddit are suddenly a hot commodity.
  - solomatov 8y ago
    Recent advances in DL for NLP will easily be able to help with it. Just rephrasing, nothing fancy. Though, I am not sure whether it will be considered non excerpt or whether EU will introduce new laws to work this around.
IanCal 8y ago
I don't quite get this, the problem is not with linking, but the link previews.
- jsnell 8y ago
  It seems pretty clear that the intent is for this to cover the current linking/snippeting practices. If it wasn't covered, there is no chance of this law providing publishers a new revenue stream. And what are those current practices? On Google News it appears to literally be just the title and maybe a tiny thumbnail image. On search it's those plus less than a sentence of text. It's pretty hard to see the intent here as not covering even just a link that uses the original title. Links that can't even use the original title would be totally nonviable, they might as well not exist. And again, this proposal would disallow even an opt-in arrangement.
  - walterbell 8y ago
    What about HN, which is a link + title?
    - c3o 8y ago
      This would absolutely apply to sites like HN or Reddit. Of course sites outsite EU jurisdiction aren't required to follow EU law, but may eventually find themselves ordered blocked by European ISPs if they don't.
  - merinowool 8y ago
    Maybe the problem is that most of the articles nowadays could be shortened to just a few sentences as the rest of the body is just a filler and people just don't want to waste time going to the linked sites to ingest it?
speedplane 8y ago
There are a few less obvious reasons why you wouldn't want to allow people to link to your content: - Privacy: You want to be in control of how the information on your site is procured. This is common on government sites that generally allow public access, but require all sorts of forms and certifications to gain that access. - Competition: If you are competing with Google or another to create the user's initial landing page, you would reasonably want to prevent them to access your own landing page content. - Trust/Reputation: Google tries to link to as many pages as it can, but it can't link to them all. If your goal is to provide a trusted comprehensive service, you may want to deter "easy" but "non-comprehensive" access to your content. For example, it's conceivable that a medical journal would prevent access because Google only indexes 40% of it's content, and end users may develop a false (and potentially deadly) understanding that Google is comprehensive.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  Absolutely, but not getting linked to has always been an option. Publishers want Google to link to their content. At the same time they want Google to pay for the honor and prevent competitors from letting Google link to their content for free. The only reason this ridiculously brazen set of demands doesn't get laughed out of the room is that these publishers have tremendous political clout.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    The big issue is that Google over time has moved to scrape the web. One big thing Google has done recently is they extract what you search for from a website, and show it inline. E.g. when I search for a recipe, I get the result in the Google search, and don’t need to visit their website. https://i.k8r.eu/aILGEg https://i.k8r.eu/aILGEg Google extracts reviews from Yelp!, and I can read them without visiting Yelp!. They’re doing this for everything, and AMP furthers this. Google is trying to keep the user as long as possible on Google, and show snippets instead of letting users leave. As result many of these sites lose out on ad impressions, and money. Google has no way to disable this feature short of entire unlisting your site.
lucio 8y ago
>Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off. You'll be accused to be a conspiracy theorist. Is that legal in the EU still?
- rahimnathwani 8y ago
  You mean is it legal to "think this is a good idea"?

by jsnell 8y ago

merinowool 8y ago

This makes perfect sense for socialist regime - keep few large outlets that you can control easily. It really boggles my mind that people believe EU has any good intentions. They aim for total control of every aspect of ones live.

mrlatinos 8y ago
Bingo.
joejerryronnie 8y ago
At least China is upfront and honest about their push toward techno-totalitarianism.
whataretensors 8y ago
I don't necessarily agree but the immediate downvotes anyone receives for questioning the EU's pure intentions is interesting. People are either extremely trusting of huge global governments or we're being brigaded.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 8y ago
  I didn't downvote, but the part I object to is the socialist moniker, not the questioning of their motives.
- merinowool 8y ago
  I rarely comment on EU because of that. It seems like EU has its own brigade of "Brussel trolls"
pacnard 8y ago
I think there are EU paid shills on HackerNews now. They do exist. I've also noticed they downvote anti-EU post en masse after they've been posted for some time (I have multiple throwaway). Sorry for the tin foil, but it's not normal that when a post is anti-EU it gets upvoted at first and then it suddently falls into oblivion in a short amount of time, like someone suddently noticed. That's not a normal pattern for upvotes/downvotes on these kind of boards. Honestly it's sad that ycombinators, and many other private companies, have to deal with State-paid actors that influence discussions on their boards. I'm also not really happy I have to write such inflamatory posts, but while I know I don't have proof I can't stop myself in revealing what I suspect. In any case we're reaching another point in history where we will soon have to fight for basic human rights in western countries. And when these times come it means that as there are victims there are persecutors. Good times ahead.
- xevb3k 8y ago
  There’s no karma level that allows users to downvote articles according to the unofficial hackernews faq. It’s possible that the admins downweight the articles because politics in general is frowned upon? I don’t think you really have much proof on pro-EU state sponsored sock puppets... but a more detailed analysis would be interesting!
  - pacnard 8y ago
    I am talking about comments. Of course I can be wrong about this situation since it's basically gut feeling and perceptions. Still, aside from the votes, there have been some really weird comments in this thread too, something that just doesn't feel it can align with how a programmer or entreprenur would express himself. Sorry if I'm sharing my emotions.
    - ACow_Adonis 8y ago
      I've said it in other threads and I'll say it again: programmers and entrepreneurs are far more than silicon valley, advertising companies, and ad supported websites. Part of the reason may be the myopia of a certain type of programmer in not realising they are possibly the minority. As an aside, each time I post a comment like this, my karma goes up and down like a yo-yo for 24 hours :p

TAForObvReasons 8y ago

It's absolutely insane that freebooting [1] on Facebook was allowed to persist for so long. It's easy to see the right to monetary remuneration as a method of addressing a massive loophole exploited by Facebook and certain users for years. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6A1Lt0kvMA

raverbashing 8y ago

Yeah, it's absurd. > Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off. Maybe that's the idea, but I think it's shooting yourself in the foot, even then.

bluelu 8y ago
It's even worse. Everyone who you link to has the right to claim damages(in case they are press). So you will have to be careful who you link to since a single link could already fall into the new legislation depending on the member state.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  Does anyone know how this "press" is defined in the proposal? More and more legal entities (governments, companies,...) seem to be moving to actively blurring lines so as to induce fines and damages. Suppose instead the proposal mandated any content hoster (press or not) to include a <linktax> tag so that hosting software can be configured to suppress the inclusion of links to pages that contain the tag. Without such an explicit tag, the situation will end up similar to ad blockers, with random distributed lists of sources that would probably qualify as "press"
  - c3o 8y ago
    In the Commission proposal: "‘press publication’ means a fixation of a collection of literary works of a journalistic nature, which may also comprise other works or subject-matter and constitutes an individual item within a periodical or regularly-updated publication under a single title, such as a newspaper or a general or special interest magazine, having the purpose of providing information related to news or other topics and published in any media under the initiative, editorial responsibility and control of a service provider."
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      Thank you very much for looking it up! The 'definition' is exactly as vague as I feared it to be: Consider a blog, one could easily argue that it is a (samizdat) press publication, the blog has a name or title, is regularly updated, provides information to news or other topics and is published as a medium (everything on the web is published in the medium of HTML, PDF, ...) under the initiative, editorial responsibility and control of the "service provider" of whomever maintains the blog. The same can be argued for any website, forum, government webpage (so we can't even safely link to government pages without exposing oneself to the risk of a fine!) If the goal was not to expose normal daily citizen activity to the risk of fines, then they should simply require "press publications" to self-declare themselves to be such by means of a <linktax> tag, or perhaps even better, by having those providers who WISH to be freely linked to provide a <linkpermission> tag containing a cryptographic signature endorsing free circulation, such that upload filters can verify without users having to rely on decentralized lists of educated guesses of who would or would not sue for linking freely...

yummybear 8y ago

I can imagine websites refusing to link and instead displays the URL so the user can enter it themselves. A lot of new companies will pop up offering their LINKTAX compliant packages that offer automatic downgrading of off-site links to user-selectable link fields, some even with custom functionality to automatically place the link in the clipboard. Tech savvy users will use adblockers to disable this auto-delinking script. All uploads will go through the few behemoths of media that can implement the upload filtering, like YouTube. User uploaded profile images will be substituted for generated images by the website. Uploaded text content such as comments will be disabled for all but the websites that live off them. Get used to seeing "Your comment is not currently visible, but awaiting moderation". What a miserable, sad web...

kd5bjo 8y ago
It's not the link that's being taxed, but the short excerpt that's being displayed. If a website writes its own summary instead of taking a snippet directly from the article, there shouldn't be any fee.
- dazc 8y ago
  Isn't that what the meta description is for?
- hessenwolf 8y ago
  Those auto-summary bots on reddit are suddenly a hot commodity.
- solomatov 8y ago
  Recent advances in DL for NLP will easily be able to help with it. Just rephrasing, nothing fancy. Though, I am not sure whether it will be considered non excerpt or whether EU will introduce new laws to work this around.

IanCal 8y ago

I don't quite get this, the problem is not with linking, but the link previews.

jsnell 8y ago
It seems pretty clear that the intent is for this to cover the current linking/snippeting practices. If it wasn't covered, there is no chance of this law providing publishers a new revenue stream. And what are those current practices? On Google News it appears to literally be just the title and maybe a tiny thumbnail image. On search it's those plus less than a sentence of text. It's pretty hard to see the intent here as not covering even just a link that uses the original title. Links that can't even use the original title would be totally nonviable, they might as well not exist. And again, this proposal would disallow even an opt-in arrangement.
- walterbell 8y ago
  What about HN, which is a link + title?
  - c3o 8y ago
    This would absolutely apply to sites like HN or Reddit. Of course sites outsite EU jurisdiction aren't required to follow EU law, but may eventually find themselves ordered blocked by European ISPs if they don't.
- merinowool 8y ago
  Maybe the problem is that most of the articles nowadays could be shortened to just a few sentences as the rest of the body is just a filler and people just don't want to waste time going to the linked sites to ingest it?

speedplane 8y ago

There are a few less obvious reasons why you wouldn't want to allow people to link to your content: - Privacy: You want to be in control of how the information on your site is procured. This is common on government sites that generally allow public access, but require all sorts of forms and certifications to gain that access. - Competition: If you are competing with Google or another to create the user's initial landing page, you would reasonably want to prevent them to access your own landing page content. - Trust/Reputation: Google tries to link to as many pages as it can, but it can't link to them all. If your goal is to provide a trusted comprehensive service, you may want to deter "easy" but "non-comprehensive" access to your content. For example, it's conceivable that a medical journal would prevent access because Google only indexes 40% of it's content, and end users may develop a false (and potentially deadly) understanding that Google is comprehensive.

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
Absolutely, but not getting linked to has always been an option. Publishers want Google to link to their content. At the same time they want Google to pay for the honor and prevent competitors from letting Google link to their content for free. The only reason this ridiculously brazen set of demands doesn't get laughed out of the room is that these publishers have tremendous political clout.
- kuschku 8y ago
  The big issue is that Google over time has moved to scrape the web. One big thing Google has done recently is they extract what you search for from a website, and show it inline. E.g. when I search for a recipe, I get the result in the Google search, and don’t need to visit their website. https://i.k8r.eu/aILGEg https://i.k8r.eu/aILGEg Google extracts reviews from Yelp!, and I can read them without visiting Yelp!. They’re doing this for everything, and AMP furthers this. Google is trying to keep the user as long as possible on Google, and show snippets instead of letting users leave. As result many of these sites lose out on ad impressions, and money. Google has no way to disable this feature short of entire unlisting your site.

lucio 8y ago

>Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off. You'll be accused to be a conspiracy theorist. Is that legal in the EU still?

rahimnathwani 8y ago
You mean is it legal to "think this is a good idea"?