11 ms·

This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate. So I guess this is bad. --goes and reads article--

• glitchc 8y ago
  They're dismantling content aggregation as a business model. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
• raverbashing 8y ago
  I'm not too worried about this one. This will just mean platforms will not link to publishers. EVER It already failed in Spain and Germany, they will just shoot themselves in the foot again.
  • visarga 8y ago
    I wrote a Romanian news concentrator as a hobby project, guess I will have to put it down now. They were 99% bullshit anyway - clickbait and fake news. That's what they are protecting.
    • v_lisivka 8y ago
      Why not just use URL shortener outside of EU?
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • CloudNetworking 8y ago
        Would you fund the lawsuits they'll get?
        • manfredo 8y ago
          If the link shortener is operated by an entity outside the EU is it still subject to EU law?
          • CloudNetworking 8y ago
            You'll get the lawsuit, not the link shortener.
      • visarga 8y ago
        If I use the article title and main image thumbnail I might still be under legal restrictions.
  • alfredallan1 8y ago
    So does this mean *this HN post is illegal because it links to a news article?
    • ernesth 8y ago
      No. According to the so called link-tax article, it is not linking but putting content that makes a platform liable. So this HN post would not be illegal because of the link, but maybe because of the title that was "stolen" from the publisher. The aim is at news.google.com and other search engines and news aggregators that include a blurb coming from the article along the link. To be honest, it is not yet clear if they intend for the title to be taxed or not.
      • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > it is not linking but putting content that makes a platform liable All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though.
        • ahel 8y ago
          > All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though. Like this one.
          • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
            > Like this one Not quite. My previous comment linked to another comment. I don't believe that would be covered by this copyright proposal. What would be covered would be a HN user posting a link to an EU publication, my reading it, and then quoting from a portion of it. The simplest fix appears to be banning linking to EU publications.
            • alfredallan1 8y ago
              I don’t usually try to deliberately ask stupid questions, but I can’t help myself in this instance. What counts as a EU publication? The author residing in the EU? Someone with a special “publisher” license? The author possessing EU citizenship? EU readership? .eu domain name? The domain registrar? The physical servers of the web hosting service? The backup service? What about those that use cloud services who have their physical infrastructure spread out wherever? And various combinations of the above… Lastly, how would checking any of these be implemented by the software that’s supposed to be scanning for content that could possibly be in violation?
  • sebst 8y ago
    False. They will shoot themselves in the foot, yes. But at least in Germany, Google is the only entity which was granted a free "licence" by the collecting society. This puts Google in a better place than any other news aggregator.
    • pas 8y ago
      Any lawsuit in progress with regards to that?
      • Filligree 8y ago
        It's not illegal, so that would require a law change. Which is what this article is about.
        • pas 8y ago
          It sounds very much like discrimination - if no other aggregator / news site gets the same treatment.
          • sebst 8y ago
            Interesting argument. Because this is the same anti-trust argument the publishers used against Google: "Google has monopolistic power, so they should be obliged to list our content (and then, pay)". On that argument the Spanish version of the copyright law, Google decided to shut down News for Spain completely.
          • drak0n1c 8y ago
            Even the most well-intentioned regulations often end up benefitting the largest and most entrenched industry players. The term is "regulatory capture".
  • merinowool 8y ago
    In Spain they _had to_ link to publishers, so Google has shut down their service.
    • gpvos 8y ago
      No, the problem was that publishers were not permitted to grant free licenses.
• hesk 8y ago
  The law was basically made at the publisher’s behest to get Google to pay them. So far, it has spectularly backfired. In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated. In Spain, they went a bit further and wrote into the law that Google had to list news sites in their index. So Google News shut down in Spain. Law defeated. I guess, third time’s the charm?
  • sampo 8y ago
    So Google gets licenses to link to new sites for free, but smaller companies and private people's website cannot link to news sites?
    • sebst 8y ago
      Yes. Exactly.
      • rdlecler1 8y ago
        And the whole law was enacted because of Google.... Let's have regulation for regulation's sake!
      • raverbashing 8y ago
        But it's just not link, it's show a snippet (and potentially a title) (or you can link and replace every snippet with 'censored by the EU' or something - might be a good strategy for raising awareness)
        • Filligree 8y ago
          Showing the snippet makes people more likely to click through, not less. If you aren't a copyright maximalist, how is that not good for both aggregator and news site? A better question is whether it's good for the user. Filter bubble, and all.
          • 8y ago
• blibble 8y ago
  > Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation? why do you think they're out of touch? they know exactly what they're doing: what they've been told to by the media companies http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/20180108STO91215/transparency-register-who-is-lobbying-the-eu-infographic http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/2...
• t0mislav 8y ago
  >> Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved. >What the fucking FUCK? This does not surprise me! If your site has for example 5 article titles from CNN, linking all of them to original CNN articles, probably you have more benefit from that than CNN. People this days like to skim through titles and not even bothering to read full articles, to click link.
  • vorpalhex 8y ago
    So then obviously CNN should never write an article again and isn't a profitable business... That is complete and utter nonsense. Linking itself adds value - see the uproar with Facebook getting rid of news in the feed. If the publishers genuinely felt as you do, they would simply prevent content being linked to by Google News/etc. Instead they want to demand payment for it, and force the behavior instead of letting Google choose cheaper news sources to link to.
    • hoppelhase 8y ago
      That's why we have so much clickbait.
      • c12 8y ago
        Hmm... so maybe it's not all bad? If it gets rid of clickbait ;)
    • Scarblac 8y ago
      If a single publisher chooses to do that, they only hurt themselves, Google is far too big. If it's forced for all publishers, it might actually have an effect.
      • stvswn 8y ago
        Then why pass a law? If what you say is true, the publishers could enter alliances with each other and block Google with robots.txt until Google agrees to pay. I believe the answer is that some MEPs don't really care if it "works" or not, because they can blame Google when Google blocks traffic. They want to be seen as standing up to American tech companies.
• elorant 8y ago
  I think that Article 11 will backfire. What if Google decides to remove all publishers from search results to avoid having to pay a fee? Their traffic will tank.
  • Scarblac 8y ago
    If Google doesn't link to anything anymore, its own traffic may hurt a bit as well.
    • realusername 8y ago
      There's plenty of non-EU news to link to.
      • Scarblac 8y ago
        Sure, but most of it isn't particularly interesting for EU readers. The vast majority isn't even in their own language.
        • realusername 8y ago
          Only temporarily. A lot of publishers would be happy to increase their current market share to cover EU content. At least for English, French and Spanish, I could easily see some foreign media boosting their traffic.
          • T-N-T 8y ago
            Propaganda organs like Russia Today already have versions translated in various European languages. They would be absolutely delighted to be the last and only piece of internet news to be available on google. Europe is shooting itself on the foot as always.
        • magduf 8y ago
          Al Jazeera news has an English-language version, oriented towards readers in English-speaking countries. RT is the same. News aggregators can link to journalism sources like these without having to pay extra fees. Of course, it might seem problematic that EU readers would get news from a Middle Eastern state-owned news source and a propaganda outlet of the Russian government, but if that's what the EU wants, it's their right to legislate that.
• Scarblac 8y ago
  On the one hand I can see how stupid these laws are in view of how the Web currently works and how successful it is. On the other hand, I think companies like Google and Facebook are FAR too large and powerful and I think the only way to deal with that is by making the Web less good at what it does.
  • influx 8y ago
    See also: What does it mean cut off your nose to spite your face?
  • bertil 8y ago
    Those laws have been tried in several European countries, and the strategy is always the same: - Google had to exclude the plaintiffs or shut down the service because they were not allowed to operate it without a license, and could not get a license in time; - Deprived of Google traffic, the News site audience suddenly dropped and they granted Google a free license, as an emergency process to keep the lights on; - Google keeps that free license for all sites, every other operator simply doesn’t have the capacity to reach out to every site, so competition to Google is completely killed. The worst part of all this? There is a very old convention, well enforced, that already handles it: robots.txt
    • Scarblac 8y ago
      Yes. It was impossible because it was always single sites doing it, and that doesn't work. To prevent that scenario, this law is for all news sites and doesn't allow free licenses. No idea how it'll work out.
      • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        Either Google will pay... or they won't. If they won't, nobody can find European news articles, and news traffic drops, and news sites get financially hurt (just like it's played out several times in the past). Then they'll get the idea that the law was a stupid idea, and work to get it quickly changed. If I understand correctly, which way this goes is completely at Google's discretion. And Google hasn't shown inclination to cooperate with such schemes in the past...
• codetrotter 8y ago
  > Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web? It's absolute madness. Some people say that you can't solve political problems with technology but at this point it seems to me that politicians are ruining the web and there is no stopping them by political means. So it will have to be a technological solution. We need strong anonymization and strong decentralization to become the default. The rules that are being put in place here are very dangerous to democracy. It limits the dissemination of information. You don't need to believe that there is any "evil" intent (I don't think there is, I think it's just greed on the part of businesses and lack of understanding on the part of the politicians) to see that once these limitations come into effect it becomes easier to lie to people and to control them. We are setting ourselves up for fascist governments to be able to rise and it seems that most people don't even care :(
  • bgorman 8y ago
    Perhaps the solution is political, but it involves breaking up the worlds current political order i.e. "democracy".
    • ravar 8y ago
      Listening to Yanis Varoufakis talk about what Greece went through you get the sense that what they have on the Europe wide level isn't exactly democracy.
• stevetodd 8y ago
  This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate. This is usually the case. it’s not possible for them to be experts on everything.
• rpenm 8y ago
  The draft explicitly excludes hyperlinks from copyright protection. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52016PC0593&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
• tscs37 8y ago
  Notably, the pure act of linking is not what is being require d a licensing fee for. Rather if you take exerpts of the content (like for example Twitter link previews)
• DanBC 8y ago
  Probably best to actually read article 11 before commenting.
• pbasista 8y ago
  > ... What the fucking FUCK? You seem to have it all figured out. Did you do any serious research on the subject that could perhaps justify your perspective? You criticize the proposal mostly because it brings change, but you do not really analyze its impact. The lawmakers in the committee have probably spent hours studying this proposal and discussing it in detail with field experts and other affected parties. The result of their vote was far from unanimous, which means that they were not able to reach a generally acceptable consensus. To me, that indicates that the judgement about the proposal is not simple or straightforward and that quick conclusions of the "hold my beer" type should be avoided.
• cityhomesteader 8y ago
  > This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate. It's very naive to think that highly intelligent people don't know or care about what they regulate. I think it is the exact opposite. They care and understand deeply. > Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web? Amazing isn't it. > Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation? Think about who this benefits. You are just viewing it from one side. Who stands to benefit from all this?
  • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    > It's very naive to think that highly intelligent people don't know or care about what they regulate. These may be highly intelligent people, but what they are highly skilled at is the art of obtaining and keeping political office. That does not necessarily say anything about their knowledge of the industries they regulate, or their ability to write regulations that are free from disastrous side effects. > Think about who this benefits. You are just viewing it from one side. Who stands to benefit from all this? Maybe you could actually say something, instead of just hinting?
    • cityhomesteader 8y ago
      > These may be highly intelligent people, but what they are highly skilled at is the art of obtaining and keeping political office. Agreed. That's my point. > That does not necessarily say anything about their knowledge of the industries they regulate, or their ability to write regulations that are free from disastrous side effects. They had teams of people helping them understand. Do you think these experts who work for the politicians and/or the industry don't know what the side effects are? Just because the effects would be "disastrous" for you and me doesn't mean it will be disastrous for the politicians or the people who they work for. > Maybe you could actually say something, instead of just hinting? I thought it was obvious. And I was trying to get you to actually think. Do you think these guys just decided one day to make changes to the rules of the internet for fun? Why do you think they are making these changes? If you can figure it out, then let me know.