5 ms·

I think this proposed law is completely absurd. People who obviously don’t understand how the internet works have created it. For those not familiar. There are

by baxtr 8y ago

I think this proposed law is completely absurd. People who obviously don’t understand how the internet works have created it. For those not familiar. There are two main points that are quite harmful: #1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies #2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw. The whole thing is nuts. Please, if you live in the EU, call your MEP about this. @senficon is leading the fight on this.

teamhappy 8y ago
> Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies The law explicitly states that the size of the company, the amount of data that is uploaded and the availability, cost and effectiveness of the measures should be taken into account. I don't understand how you call call this completely absurd considering that sites like Twitch and YouTube are already doing it. > Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. The "link tax" has nothing whatsoever to do with linking. If you run a commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications you now have to obtain a license to do so. That's all there is to it.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > If you run a commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications you now have to obtain a license to do so Suppose someone posts a Der Spiegel article. I read it and quote a sentence in a comment. Y Combinator must now (a) reach out to Der Spiegel, (b) negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of Der Spiegel content, (d) remit international payments to Der Spiegel and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU compliance costs entail? (I'm ignoring questions around whether including the article's title itself requires fee remittance.) That's what is being proposed and that is dumb.
  - phicoh 8y ago
    If I got it correct, that is not what is proposed. What is proposed is that you pay an amount of money to a collection agency and then get the right to publish those snippets. I think it is a bad proposal that will do more harm than good. But it is something that can be made to work.
    - anoncow 8y ago
      Has the EU reduced itself to this? They want to be the internet's middlemen? Shame. Had high hopes from the EU, but it seems like someone is pushing an agenda.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > What is proposed is that you pay an amount of money to a collection agency and then get the right to publish those snippets Pardon me, so I post a comment on Hacker News and now Y Combinator has to (a) identify Der Spiegel's collection agency, (b) reach out to said agency, (b) negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of Der Spiegel content, (d) remit international payments to Der Spiegel's collection agency and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU compliance costs entail. This system having the benefit that when I quote Le Temps, presuming they work with the same collection agency, we cut out step (b). Otherwise all of that again.
      - DanBC 8y ago
        Can you point to the article of the proposed regulation that you're talking about please?
        phicoh 8y ago
        The relevant part should be Amendment 746 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMMITTEES/JURI/AM/2018/06-20/1124644EN.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMM...
      - phicoh 8y ago
- baxtr 8y ago
  a) if they’re already „doing it“, tell me: why do we need a law exactly then? b) do you know how a link works? Any link is usually a preview of content because it has e.g. a title. Where do you draw the line? And what is a commercial site exactly? Google news is free for example. We have tried this in Germany and in Spain. It didn’t work. Why do it on EU level again just to put every site owner at legal risk?
  - teamhappy 8y ago
    The proposal says "The rights referred to in the first subparagraph shall not apply in respect of uses of insubstantial parts of a press publication". The title is the least substantial part I can think of.
    - baxtr 8y ago
      This is your personal interpretation and you might be right. But in reality, if it's not defined concretely enough (like in this case), courts will decide. Until then, everybody should rather refrain from linking, quoting and commenting.
- skywhopper 8y ago
  This is the second comment formatted in a very similar way, responding to the same points in the same way. Having learned about troll farms, I have to wonder how many HN accounts are run by people sitting in cubes, posting talking points and paid by the corporate lobbyists who are pushing these laws through the EU parliament. teamhappy, your arguments make no sense. Obtaining a license to quote a news article? YouTube's content filtering held up as an example of a system that works well? These are ridiculous statements. I hope you are getting paid well and don't really believe this stuff.
  - dang 8y ago
    You've broken the site guidelines here, which specifically ask people not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that. If you or anyone wants explanation of why we have this rule, I've posted a ton about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
dfischer 8y ago
Wow point two is insane. It’s exactly the opposite reason the browser based web was built. Damn.
pif 8y ago
Puts devil's advocate hat on... > ...who obviously don’t understand how the internet works... Legislators are not requested to know how things do work: they are requested to define how things will work!
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  Right! Math would be so much easier if PI was a round number so let’s get legislation to define it that way.
  - toyg 8y ago
    False analogy: pi exists in nature, we just discover it; while the web is entirely man-made - and as such, can be mandated. Someone could legislate that all websites should be blue and http headers should be made of emojis, there is nothing in nature that would stop that from happening. In fact, network protocols themselves are basically laws for machines.
- baxtr 8y ago
  This is indeed a fair point. However, as legislator you ought to have the fantasy and courage to imagine what else might happen once your law becomes real. It is not enough to remake the world and ignore all side-effects.
  - pif 8y ago
    Sure, I agree!
claudius 8y ago
> #1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies I find this actually quite good. Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless, cost a lot of bandwidth and unnecessarily centralise yet another part of our lives. Anything which harms them will effectively be a net positive. > #2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw. Note that it’s not a link tax but a tax to use snippets of the article. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. Right now this is already a somewhat grey area and, again, it won’t exactly hurt anyone but the right people. So, sure, this is some extra burden yadda yadda, but mostly it will just limit pointless business activities sucking up bandwidth.
- baxtr 8y ago
  > Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless You just uploaded user content to HN... well. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. This is a link in HTML: <a href="URL" title="link title" target="link target">link label</a> The "link lable" is a preview/snippet of content. If I a quote 1-2 sentences from the article, it is a snippet. Where do you draw the line?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - DanBC 8y ago
    If the article is a one or two sentence article then you can't quote all of it. If you've quoted an insubstantial portion then the law already says that's ok.
DanBC 8y ago
No, they don't want to be paid if you link to their content. They want you to have a licence if you reproduce their content for commercial gain. It's really important that people who oppose this law are strictly correct when talking to their MEP, because otherwise we risk everything being ignored because of these factual errors.
- baxtr 8y ago
  I'm really sorry, but you can't just state these things as facts. This is your personal interpretation. The text leaves room for interpretation. For example: What is a commercial site? Is google news commercial? It is free for users. Why is a title not a preview? I know you will quote the law with the "substantial" part, but until it is not defined 100% (e.g. by courts) , everybody linking and quoting is at legal risk.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    Commercial is really well defined: it's something you attempt to make money from. Google News is commercial. > Why is a title not a preview? I know you will quote the law with the "substantial" part, but until it is not defined 100% (e.g. by courts), everybody linking and quoting is at legal risk. Berne Convention was introduced in 1886. We've had 130 years of interpreting copyright law to find the limits of fair use. But, since you're interested in legal risk, the law attempts to clear up one area around orphaned works. > This Directive provides for rules to adapt certain exceptions and limitations to digital and cross-border environments, as well as measures to facilitate certain licensing practices as regards the dissemination of out -of-commerce works and the online availability of audiovisual works on video-on-demand platforms with a view to ensuring wider access to content. I think it's a bad law, and I've already contacted my MEP to talk about it, but I think people really need to read and understand a law before campaigning about it. When people talk about "link tax" their MEP will think "this law does no such thing, this person doesn't understand what they're talking about, I can ignore them". It's a very harmful bit of campaigning to promote the myth of a link tax.
    - baxtr 8y ago

by baxtr 8y ago

teamhappy 8y ago

> Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies The law explicitly states that the size of the company, the amount of data that is uploaded and the availability, cost and effectiveness of the measures should be taken into account. I don't understand how you call call this completely absurd considering that sites like Twitch and YouTube are already doing it. > Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. The "link tax" has nothing whatsoever to do with linking. If you run a commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications you now have to obtain a license to do so. That's all there is to it.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> If you run a commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications you now have to obtain a license to do so Suppose someone posts a Der Spiegel article. I read it and quote a sentence in a comment. Y Combinator must now (a) reach out to Der Spiegel, (b) negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of Der Spiegel content, (d) remit international payments to Der Spiegel and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU compliance costs entail? (I'm ignoring questions around whether including the article's title itself requires fee remittance.) That's what is being proposed and that is dumb.
- phicoh 8y ago
  If I got it correct, that is not what is proposed. What is proposed is that you pay an amount of money to a collection agency and then get the right to publish those snippets. I think it is a bad proposal that will do more harm than good. But it is something that can be made to work.
  - anoncow 8y ago
    Has the EU reduced itself to this? They want to be the internet's middlemen? Shame. Had high hopes from the EU, but it seems like someone is pushing an agenda.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > What is proposed is that you pay an amount of money to a collection agency and then get the right to publish those snippets Pardon me, so I post a comment on Hacker News and now Y Combinator has to (a) identify Der Spiegel's collection agency, (b) reach out to said agency, (b) negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of Der Spiegel content, (d) remit international payments to Der Spiegel's collection agency and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU compliance costs entail. This system having the benefit that when I quote Le Temps, presuming they work with the same collection agency, we cut out step (b). Otherwise all of that again.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      Can you point to the article of the proposed regulation that you're talking about please?
      - phicoh 8y ago
        The relevant part should be Amendment 746 http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMMITTEES/JURI/AM/2018/06-20/1124644EN.pdf http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMM...
    - phicoh 8y ago
baxtr 8y ago
a) if they’re already „doing it“, tell me: why do we need a law exactly then? b) do you know how a link works? Any link is usually a preview of content because it has e.g. a title. Where do you draw the line? And what is a commercial site exactly? Google news is free for example. We have tried this in Germany and in Spain. It didn’t work. Why do it on EU level again just to put every site owner at legal risk?
- teamhappy 8y ago
  The proposal says "The rights referred to in the first subparagraph shall not apply in respect of uses of insubstantial parts of a press publication". The title is the least substantial part I can think of.
  - baxtr 8y ago
    This is your personal interpretation and you might be right. But in reality, if it's not defined concretely enough (like in this case), courts will decide. Until then, everybody should rather refrain from linking, quoting and commenting.
skywhopper 8y ago
This is the second comment formatted in a very similar way, responding to the same points in the same way. Having learned about troll farms, I have to wonder how many HN accounts are run by people sitting in cubes, posting talking points and paid by the corporate lobbyists who are pushing these laws through the EU parliament. teamhappy, your arguments make no sense. Obtaining a license to quote a news article? YouTube's content filtering held up as an example of a system that works well? These are ridiculous statements. I hope you are getting paid well and don't really believe this stuff.
- dang 8y ago
  You've broken the site guidelines here, which specifically ask people not to insinuate astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that. If you or anyone wants explanation of why we have this rule, I've posted a ton about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

dfischer 8y ago

Wow point two is insane. It’s exactly the opposite reason the browser based web was built. Damn.

pif 8y ago

Puts devil's advocate hat on... > ...who obviously don’t understand how the internet works... Legislators are not requested to know how things do work: they are requested to define how things will work!

Ensorceled 8y ago
Right! Math would be so much easier if PI was a round number so let’s get legislation to define it that way.
- toyg 8y ago
  False analogy: pi exists in nature, we just discover it; while the web is entirely man-made - and as such, can be mandated. Someone could legislate that all websites should be blue and http headers should be made of emojis, there is nothing in nature that would stop that from happening. In fact, network protocols themselves are basically laws for machines.
baxtr 8y ago
This is indeed a fair point. However, as legislator you ought to have the fantasy and courage to imagine what else might happen once your law becomes real. It is not enough to remake the world and ignore all side-effects.
- pif 8y ago
  Sure, I agree!

claudius 8y ago

> #1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies I find this actually quite good. Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless, cost a lot of bandwidth and unnecessarily centralise yet another part of our lives. Anything which harms them will effectively be a net positive. > #2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw. Note that it’s not a link tax but a tax to use snippets of the article. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. Right now this is already a somewhat grey area and, again, it won’t exactly hurt anyone but the right people. So, sure, this is some extra burden yadda yadda, but mostly it will just limit pointless business activities sucking up bandwidth.

baxtr 8y ago
> Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless You just uploaded user content to HN... well. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. This is a link in HTML: <a href="URL" title="link title" target="link target">link label</a> The "link lable" is a preview/snippet of content. If I a quote 1-2 sentences from the article, it is a snippet. Where do you draw the line?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- DanBC 8y ago
  If the article is a one or two sentence article then you can't quote all of it. If you've quoted an insubstantial portion then the law already says that's ok.

DanBC 8y ago

No, they don't want to be paid if you link to their content. They want you to have a licence if you reproduce their content for commercial gain. It's really important that people who oppose this law are strictly correct when talking to their MEP, because otherwise we risk everything being ignored because of these factual errors.

baxtr 8y ago
I'm really sorry, but you can't just state these things as facts. This is your personal interpretation. The text leaves room for interpretation. For example: What is a commercial site? Is google news commercial? It is free for users. Why is a title not a preview? I know you will quote the law with the "substantial" part, but until it is not defined 100% (e.g. by courts) , everybody linking and quoting is at legal risk.
- DanBC 8y ago
  Commercial is really well defined: it's something you attempt to make money from. Google News is commercial. > Why is a title not a preview? I know you will quote the law with the "substantial" part, but until it is not defined 100% (e.g. by courts), everybody linking and quoting is at legal risk. Berne Convention was introduced in 1886. We've had 130 years of interpreting copyright law to find the limits of fair use. But, since you're interested in legal risk, the law attempts to clear up one area around orphaned works. > This Directive provides for rules to adapt certain exceptions and limitations to digital and cross-border environments, as well as measures to facilitate certain licensing practices as regards the dissemination of out -of-commerce works and the online availability of audiovisual works on video-on-demand platforms with a view to ensuring wider access to content. I think it's a bad law, and I've already contacted my MEP to talk about it, but I think people really need to read and understand a law before campaigning about it. When people talk about "link tax" their MEP will think "this law does no such thing, this person doesn't understand what they're talking about, I can ignore them". It's a very harmful bit of campaigning to promote the myth of a link tax.
  - baxtr 8y ago