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The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News

271 points by DiabloD3 8y ago

sonnyblarney 8y ago
The most bothering part is not the objective, or the nature of the law. That we can argue. But it's the absurdity of the fact that the EU can pass a law which has such massive and widespread implications - where the wording is unclear, bizarre, makes little sense, and can hardly be applied. Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots. Whatever it is, it has to be clean, simple, effective, spelled out ... or else there just shouldn't be a law.
- vilifiedtwin 8y ago
  Not only that - there is absolutely no accountability for those laws. If whatever they pass turns out to be a disaster, nobody would go to jail for that and public wouldn't be compensated. Worrying fact is that they are constantly pushing it to test how far they can go.
- sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
  Never attribute to stupidy what can be attributed to malice.
- titanix2 8y ago
  They are not idiots: they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public subventions) that is beneficial for them by presenting their political opponents in a bad way. How poor the law is is not their concern.
  - simias 8y ago
    Could we leave this one-sided manichean rhetoric to Reddit and Twitter? Saving the industry is clearly a key motivation but the tinfoil hat theory makes no sense, in most European countries subventions cater to the entire spectrum of the press regardless of political opinion. If anything destroying the press would make it even easier to control the narrative. It's not just the press either, it's the whole cultural industry that they try to save. I'm not a big fan of protectionism but if you look at the French cultural industry for instance (and contrast it with, say, Italy's) we've had some moderate success preserving it through protectionist regulations (quotas, fixed prices for books, regulations regarding advertising of movies etc...). I'm not very happy with that but pragmatically I can't completely dismiss these regulations since they appear to have had a positive effect on the local industry. I'm not saying this is the right way to go but I'm always a bit frustrated that many on HN seem to lose all sense of measure and intellectual honesty every time government or regulations are mentioned. I think this "link tax" is a bad thing but at the same time I also see the very real problem the regulators are trying to fix.
  - josefx 8y ago
    > they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public subventions) In my home country you could trace most news outlets back to a few big players and those tend to be in the top 100 rich people of the country. If they are getting public subventions I would see it more as a way for politicians to keep the coverage positive.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      This is a great point. I think there is an earnest attempt to save journalism overall ... but also consider that European industries are static, and especially the press are owned by old, rich families who have considerable influence.
- antpls 8y ago
  > Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots. Laws are supposed to be readable by everyone, you can't expect everyone to be a tech expert. If you feel like non-experts are "morons" or "idiot", you should take a break and talk to your grand-parents. Explain to them your work field, and you will realize most of the work we do everyday is artificially complex to keep everyone busy. There is actually a tendency for tech people to retain knowledge in order to acquire an advantage and power from the entire society. Tech moves fast, but the rest of us can't follow, it creates inequalities, so here are the regulations.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    No. The laws have to be technically correct, if legislators do not understand the internet it behoves them to hire experts that do. Can you imagine them writing similar, nonsensical health related laws? Moreover - the issues are not that complicated, they can be explained in an hour. They are idiots, and also too lazy to learn trivial, common things. Don't underestimate the arrogance and entitlement of European legislators: they went to expensive schools, they've mingled with the intelligentsia all of their life - of course they must 'know better' than the common person! (sarcasm).
    - antpls 8y ago
      Given I'm European, I prefer to trust my democratly elected politicians rather than a comment from a random stranger on the internet. Sorry, but thanks for the attempt.
      - sonnyblarney 8y ago
        You are also a 'random person on the internet' to all of us, so your logic as an argument does not very well apply. (Also - the EU is not Europe. It's a terrible habit that some Europeans have of conflating the two) The legislators who design these laws are not elected, and you have absolutely no ability to influence the direction of these laws. As an EU citizen, you should be more informed as to how this process works legally, but also materially. Legally, there's no relationship between voters, and the Commission designed with writing laws. They are absolutely not elected, and they don't take populist needs into consideration - in fact, it's designed specifically to not be democratic. The only hope you have might be to have MEP's amend legislation as it passes by, but almost nobody in Europe has an awareness of this process, they don't know who their MEP is, they don't know what they stand for. Can you tell me right now, without looking it up, the name of your MEP and what they represent? But this is all moot. The legislation is objectively stupid. It makes no sense. It will cause essentially an internet meltdown the likes of which nobody has ever seen. EU legislators are worrying about 'Brexit'? How are you going to live if Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and every other search engine goes black? Or when your newspapers instantly go out of business because the legislation meant to protect them kills them? The issue of 'democracy' and even 'good intent' are secondary to the fact that the legislation is very materially and very damagingly stupid. This legislation is the equivalent of making chemical weapons in your own home as a 'fun experiment' and then dying from it ... Even beyond the damage the legislation could do - it makes the Commission look basically incompetent, and it erodes the goodwill that they need to stay alive, as Euroscepticism grows on the continent. How will the plebes react if even just wikipedia goes black for whatever reason? It would be like the internet version of a 'bread revolt'.
plainOldText 8y ago
The EU has already destroyed the web surfing experience for everyone, with their cookie laws. Now most sites require users to click on some banners that cover half of the screen on mobile, just to get to the content, on some random site they might only visit once. Argh! I wonder what they'll do next. At some point in the future we're going to need a "new internet".
- Symbiote 8y ago
  The ad industry destroyed web surfing. The EU just drew attention to that. Sites without tracking cookies don't need to show a cookie banner.
  - nickpp 8y ago
    Ads were never as intrusive as that damn cookie/gdpr banner. In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      There are lots of sites without tracking cookies. HN doesn't set tracking cookies, for example. The only two cookies set are the cloudflare uid and a user login cookie, both of which are hardly meant for tracking.
      - Kiro 8y ago
        What about analytics?
        zaarn 8y ago
        As long as analytics don't produce any personal data of an individual and only aggregate data or even anonymized data, it should be perfectly fine to do without any banner. Of course, if you use Google Analytics, you can't guarantee what Google is doing, so you'll need some banner to get consent before you can perform any analytics through GA (which means you need to disable GA until the user agrees, which barely any site does anyway). If you can guarantee that the analytics won't produce or store personal data, you don't need to disable it or produce a banner.
matt4077 8y ago
While this "link tax" is indeed rather stupid, the EFF is to a certain degree overstating their case. If you check the current proposals (http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-INIT/EN/pdf http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-I...) you will find (page 93) that the Council inserted a specific exemption for wikipedia and open source code. That's in addition to a few passages that had already been included previously, and that pretty clearly show that any requirement to collect from people linking to you only applies to large, commercial publishers. Many people attack this proposal with rather wild interpretations, often of the sort of hair-splitting non-lawyers consider very smart. Those usually just get a tired rolling of the eyes from judges. Real life is nothing but nuances, yet laws need to be abstract, and provide enough guidance to adequately capture future situations. Since it's impossible to make laws for every individual case (and actually illegal in many jurisdiction), there is no way around some ambiguity in the text. Closing that gap is the fundamental task of judges, and they actually have a pretty good track record of finding equatable outcomes. It's also worth to consider the problem the EU is trying to solve: journalism has seen its revenue crash by 50% to 75%, with the disappearance not just of readers, but classifieds and advertisers at the same time. Both in Europe and the US, local newspapers will be gone from vast swaths of the country. Those that remain are but shells of what they once were. Not having some professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session every week means citizen will be effectively cut off from accurate information about politics. Yet if you don't know what is happening, it's is impossible to make decisions in the voting booth. Without this essential loopback, politicians' career prospects become entirely divorced from their actions, rendering democracy meaningless. This current proposal seems to be far too convoluted, and enough of the fears are credible to make it look like a bad idea to me. But instead of spinning conspiracy theories of who paid whom, it would (have been) far more effective to try to find some other mechanism to ensure the survival of at least some journalism. One idea I've been bouncing around for far too many years is an ad blocker that is smart enough to block only ads that are annoying or dangerous. I am quite sure that there's a balance that reduces annoyances by 80% while having far less of an impact on revenue. If something like this had succeeded in easing some of the economic pressure, it would be far less likely that politicians feel the need to devote their time to such hard-handed measures such as link taxes.
- 8y ago
funkythings 8y ago
And people wonder why the brits voted Brexit.
- carlmr 8y ago
  While this might be a benefit of Brexit, I doubt this was at the top of the list of reasons for Brexit.
  - sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
    People didn't vote for brexit because of this specific issue, but because the EU does crazy stuff like this costantly, in all industries.
    - gjm11 8y ago
      National governments do crazy stuff like this constantly too. They also do useful things. So does the EU. The case (or at least this case) against the EU is pretty much the same as the case against all governments. The right question isn't "does this organization do crazy things?" but "do the good things outweigh the bad, or the other way around?". The other thing is that I think a lot of the "EU does crazy things" narrative is deliberately, and dishonestly, pushed by people who are more interested in making the EU look bad than in the truth. (I am not suggesting that sarcasmOrTears is such a person: only that their perception of what the EU does may have been affected by the long-running Make The EU Look Bad campaign.)
      - deleted 8y ago
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      - jtbayly 8y ago
        But your own government answers to you. That’s what the Magna Carta was about. Also the US revolution.
        gjm11 8y ago
elorant 8y ago
There are two possible outcomes from Article 11. Either it will backfire and large Internet networks like Google or Facebook will start removing links to news sites which will have the opposite result from what the latter where hopping when they were lobbying for a new copyright law, or it will kill the web as we know it at least in Europe. I'd put my money on the first scenario.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  Worst case is adding a little more bureaucracy. Google will stop listing news sites, or at least summaries. The number of visitors will crash and the news sites will be forced to give Google (and others) a free license to link to their content. It not going to be an issue, some newspapers already allow to access to articles for free is you come directly from a search engine. The part I find troubling is filtering user uploaded content, that's simply not going to work.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    I also wonder about your "(and others)" parenthesis - I don't immediately have reason to believe that that would be the case.
  - Sebb767 8y ago
    We had the exact same situation in Germany already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_... In the end Google said "ok, then we'll stop listing you" and suddenly the publishers that wanted this law gave Google permission to link to them without cost. Sounds okay in theory, but every minor search engine or news aggregator which doesn't have the defacto monopoly of Google still suffers from it.
    - ru999gol 8y ago
      which then had the interesting effect of actually being great for Google, it will effectively prevent any competition of google news forever. Politicians are all corrupt/payed for, they have absolutely no concept of what they are doing and could not care less about its collateral damage.
esotericn 8y ago
If Google creates their own journalism arm, or some variant (e.g. YouTube for News), does that bypass this? Is the endgame of these EU laws full vertical integration, so you have one company paying itself, no 'third party cookie' because there's only a first party, etc?
tannhaeuser 8y ago
I'm with EFF on many things, but "link tax" is a non-starter for any serious discussion. There is no "tax" at all here, and the copyright reform isn't about "links". It's about clarifying the legal situation of search engines and news aggregators previewing large parts of other site's content, which has always been copyright infringement. "Link tax" FUD doesn't contribute.
- martimarkov 8y ago
  I mean they put up the definition from article 11 right there. Seems like a legit link tax to me.
  - pas 8y ago
    I'm lost on their first excerpt (recital 32) and their interpretation about compulsory commercial license and how it kills Creative Commons. Maybe I'm slow but that quoted text implies no such things, so the EFF makes claims without backing them up (without properly doing the work of explain the steps of how they derived those consequences).
    - martimarkov 8y ago
      Well this text states exactly that: >> Such protection should be effectively guaranteed through the introduction, in Union law, of rights related to copyright for the reproduction and making available to the public of press publications in respect of digital uses in order to obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses. Which makes some sense. If you have a digital version that needs to still give you money but them: >> In addition, the listing in a search engine should not be considered as fair and proportionate remuneration. Says you will have to pay in a different from just driving traffic to those ppl. Now if I’m a Creative Commons news outlet there is no way for me to waive that extra payment. The law states that just listing me somewhere is not enough and I need to be paid in a different way. I may not want that but the law INSISTS that I get paid in a different way. Does this make it more clear?
      - 8y ago
throwaway775757 8y ago
EU countries don't need this shit. Follow the money to see who needs it. 1. It's Finland trying to get money out of the Dutch linking to news articles in Finnish ! 2. Or is it the Bulgarians linking to Romanian content ? 3. Oh, I know! It's the French trying to get rich out of German news articles ! Of course it's stupid. No EU country benefits in any way from this. These 'laws' are being pushed by the same hegemony 'multi-national' (mostly US?) media organizations that have been actively lobbying (bribing, corrupting, coercing) weak governments around Europe and the world. The ones that killed The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites, that forced countries like Spain into adopting idiotic copyright legislation, etc. -- That being said, I hope it passes. Actually I hope they pass a law which forces web sites to put up 500 different dialog boxes, overlays, "I agree" check boxes, "Continue" buttons which turn into spinners and never go away, that force you to watch ads and register an account, that auto play 20 videos and load 96MB of ads, so that it takes you 3 hours to get to the "news" article - a bunch of rumors dressed up as opinion or a well crafted PR article. News is addictive, useless informational fast food - it's unhealthy, it doesn't provide any useful information and it has one purpose - to brainwash people with ads. So fuck them, let the system eat itself from the inside. Good quality content will endure regardless of legislation. Resist, rebel, refuse to comply - go underground if necessary.
martimarkov 8y ago
I also love how most mainstream media does not report this or cover it at all. Yeah they might have the odd article but nothing else. I personally would be extremely happy, if this pile of shit passes, to see FB and google block all EU news outlets and drive them to the ground. I mean that should be the price to pay when meddling with the freedom of information. Having your revenue down by 50-60% (hopefully) because you’re dumb enough to think that your lobbying is the smartest idea sound like justice. I just can’t believe that the EU is actually doing this. It puts a really bad taste in my mouth that it tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because of large lobbyist corporations.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  If that could fall only on those who had an active role, however minor, in lobbying for this, than yes, it sounds like justice. But there will be too much collateral.
- Devils_Avocado 8y ago
  > I just can’t believe that the EU ... actually ... tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because... This is generally how government works! But it's even worse than usual in the EU, since it's an unaccountable transnational mega-bureaucracy; MEPs are not directly elected, they are appointed by their political party after proportional representation votes (which haven't had turnout higher than 50% since 1994). You think Congress is beholden to lobbyists now? Imagine how bad it'd be if state representatives could get "re-elected" each term without ever having to put their record to a public vote!
  - martimarkov 8y ago
    Actually not 100% true with the MEPs because it's up to each individual member state. I think in Bulgaria you had to vote for a political party and a person from it. Then add proportianl representation and the ppl with the most votes in each party will go into the EP based on their respective % of the total votes. (idk if this makes sense as it might sound a bit confusing)
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ElectronShak 8y ago
the fact that individual news organisations can't even waive this right, really makes this look lobbied, because the lobbyist corporations will definitely look bad if the others choose to not charge this tax
- aembleton 8y ago
  Can't waive it, but they could charge €1 per year. I don't see why they couldn't do that.
jimnotgym 8y ago
This thread has gone way off topic. It had descended into general EU bashing and yet another GDPR debate.
guy98238710 8y ago
Why cannot we see how MEPs voted? Smearing them in local media for their votes would quickly put a stop to this and other nonsense being passed in EP. Without electronic vote tracking, MEPs are free to vote for lobbyists while sweet-talking the public.
- craigsmansion 8y ago
  You can: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fNONSGML%2bPV%2b20180912%2bRES-RCV%2bDOC%2bPDF%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f... A8-0245
  - guy98238710 8y ago
    I see no vote data on amendments 89 and 90 that proposed removal of articles 11 and 13 respectively. Even this vote on the whole law is hard to find. Personally, I couldn't find it if you didn't post it here.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      Did you not see them in the ToC? Data for amendment 89 is on page 22 and amendment 90 is on page 26.
      - guy98238710 8y ago
        I see them now. Thanks. I wish there was a clean website where this information could be easily found by picking legislation on one side and MEPs on the other side.
guy98238710 8y ago
Trampling of open content is a part of wider tendency of governments everywhere in the world to suppress and reverse automation by passing labor-intensive laws and subsidizing labor-intensive businesses. Every time we make progress with automation, they invent more work for us to do. Open content is up to 100 times more popular. It therefore requires up to 100 times less work to satisfy demand. They just cannot let this happen. This follows from the strange ethic of valuing hard work over efficiency. Labor is sacred. Avoidance of work is considered amoral. Economic output is supposed to be split according to the amount of work done, at least in theory. Any other alternative is considered communist. In order to maintain this moral system, people must be made to work even if the work is useless or subversive.
- anticensor 8y ago
  > Avoidance of work is considered amoral. Did you mean immoral? Amoral means morals being not applicable, immoral means one who flouts morals.
guy98238710 8y ago
I wonder whether this will make blogs much more popular after search engines drop links to news sites.
guy98238710 8y ago
Isn't this against freedom of speech and thus against constitution in most member states? Nobody can stop me from disseminating my ideas free of charge, right?
rayiner 8y ago
Ads killed the web anyway, now we're just fighting over the corpse.
gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago
The politicians pushing that legislation really should face life in prison as the penalty. Absolutely atrocious.
josteink 8y ago
I support lots of initiatives from the EU resulting from the tech world being unable to self-regulate. This link-tax however is so extremely flawed, so obviously lobbied by special interest and just fundamentally backwards wrt how the www works... I can’t see how they think they’re going to win the public opinion to support or respect it.
- realusername 8y ago
  > I support lots of initiatives from the EU resulting from the tech world being unable to self-regulate. I agree for the GDPR but not with this copyright directive, it's a massive disaster lobbied by the large copyright holders.
  - kmlx 8y ago
    my country's government (EU-based) uses GDPR in order to hide corrupt state employees from public scrutiny. last time it was used to hide identities of local police who were caught on tape causing grievous bodily harm to protesters. the state refused to name the culprits due to GDPR. the same GDPR is also currently used to turn people away from hospitals, as those require tens of pages of signatures in order for them to be able to treat you. does it matter to the state that they're abusing gdpr? to the contrary. they've just found another toy to fuck us over. meanwhile I'm not only abused by the state, but a bunch of US-based websites basically cut off europe from the rest of the world. in the end all I can say is that while I support the principle behind most EU ideas, the actual law that gets adopted is usually a far cry from what it should have been. also, this sort of naivety when it comes to the state power is still mind boggling. if you think google is bad, you have no idea.
    - vanderZwan 8y ago
      The problem is that the only way a lot of these EU regulations can get through is by general directive: the intents and goals are agreed upon as a group, the implementation is left to the individual state. You can imagine how impossible it would be to get all European countries to agree on anything otherwise. On top of that, a lot of these rules do really need to be adapted to local national contexts to makes sense. However, that also leaves plenty of room for exploitation, like the stuff you mentioned. I'm sorry to hear the GDPR is being abused this way.
hbogert 8y ago
This is so wrong that you almost start to think that the eff is somehow exaggerating this; they're probably not. The secrecy is the worst part. Democracies should be about openness. EU is arguably democratic and hardly open.
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- isostatic 8y ago
  The EU is usually open -- see the TTIP negotiations. The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote. If populists like Farage are in the parliament, that's only because people vote for them. Hardly undemocratic. The EU Council comprises the elected head of government of each member state. Hardly undemocratic. The EU Commission comprises a president, who is selected by the EU Council and approved or denied by the EU Parliament. The Council also appoints the members of the commission, each country appoints 1 person. In the UK this is no different to the PM appointing ministers. For this law to pass, not only does the parliament of elected MEPs have to pass it, but so does a majority of the Council, elected leaders. While it suits heads of various EU governemnts to blame 'the EU', it's entirely in their control to approve or reject the directive, and it's entirely in your MEP's control to approve or reject it.
  - lixtra 8y ago
    > The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote. Depending from which country you are from your vote may weight differently up to a factor of 11 (Luxembourg vs Spain) [1], hardly democratic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_Parliament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_...
    - PunchTornado 8y ago
      the same thing is happening in the US, right? big states like california vs smaller states like delaware. I think there is value into rules like these because otherwise smaller states will be always trumped.

271 points by DiabloD3 8y ago

The most bothering part is not the objective, or the nature of the law. That we can argue. But it's the absurdity of the fact that the EU can pass a law which has such massive and widespread implications - where the wording is unclear, bizarre, makes little sense, and can hardly be applied. Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots. Whatever it is, it has to be clean, simple, effective, spelled out ... or else there just shouldn't be a law.

vilifiedtwin 8y ago
Not only that - there is absolutely no accountability for those laws. If whatever they pass turns out to be a disaster, nobody would go to jail for that and public wouldn't be compensated. Worrying fact is that they are constantly pushing it to test how far they can go.
sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
Never attribute to stupidy what can be attributed to malice.
titanix2 8y ago
They are not idiots: they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public subventions) that is beneficial for them by presenting their political opponents in a bad way. How poor the law is is not their concern.
- simias 8y ago
  Could we leave this one-sided manichean rhetoric to Reddit and Twitter? Saving the industry is clearly a key motivation but the tinfoil hat theory makes no sense, in most European countries subventions cater to the entire spectrum of the press regardless of political opinion. If anything destroying the press would make it even easier to control the narrative. It's not just the press either, it's the whole cultural industry that they try to save. I'm not a big fan of protectionism but if you look at the French cultural industry for instance (and contrast it with, say, Italy's) we've had some moderate success preserving it through protectionist regulations (quotas, fixed prices for books, regulations regarding advertising of movies etc...). I'm not very happy with that but pragmatically I can't completely dismiss these regulations since they appear to have had a positive effect on the local industry. I'm not saying this is the right way to go but I'm always a bit frustrated that many on HN seem to lose all sense of measure and intellectual honesty every time government or regulations are mentioned. I think this "link tax" is a bad thing but at the same time I also see the very real problem the regulators are trying to fix.
- josefx 8y ago
  > they work to save a dying industry (most news outlets are running on public subventions) In my home country you could trace most news outlets back to a few big players and those tend to be in the top 100 rich people of the country. If they are getting public subventions I would see it more as a way for politicians to keep the coverage positive.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    This is a great point. I think there is an earnest attempt to save journalism overall ... but also consider that European industries are static, and especially the press are owned by old, rich families who have considerable influence.
antpls 8y ago
> Surely there are smart people working on this, but collectively they are morons. Utter idiots. Laws are supposed to be readable by everyone, you can't expect everyone to be a tech expert. If you feel like non-experts are "morons" or "idiot", you should take a break and talk to your grand-parents. Explain to them your work field, and you will realize most of the work we do everyday is artificially complex to keep everyone busy. There is actually a tendency for tech people to retain knowledge in order to acquire an advantage and power from the entire society. Tech moves fast, but the rest of us can't follow, it creates inequalities, so here are the regulations.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  No. The laws have to be technically correct, if legislators do not understand the internet it behoves them to hire experts that do. Can you imagine them writing similar, nonsensical health related laws? Moreover - the issues are not that complicated, they can be explained in an hour. They are idiots, and also too lazy to learn trivial, common things. Don't underestimate the arrogance and entitlement of European legislators: they went to expensive schools, they've mingled with the intelligentsia all of their life - of course they must 'know better' than the common person! (sarcasm).
  - antpls 8y ago
    Given I'm European, I prefer to trust my democratly elected politicians rather than a comment from a random stranger on the internet. Sorry, but thanks for the attempt.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      You are also a 'random person on the internet' to all of us, so your logic as an argument does not very well apply. (Also - the EU is not Europe. It's a terrible habit that some Europeans have of conflating the two) The legislators who design these laws are not elected, and you have absolutely no ability to influence the direction of these laws. As an EU citizen, you should be more informed as to how this process works legally, but also materially. Legally, there's no relationship between voters, and the Commission designed with writing laws. They are absolutely not elected, and they don't take populist needs into consideration - in fact, it's designed specifically to not be democratic. The only hope you have might be to have MEP's amend legislation as it passes by, but almost nobody in Europe has an awareness of this process, they don't know who their MEP is, they don't know what they stand for. Can you tell me right now, without looking it up, the name of your MEP and what they represent? But this is all moot. The legislation is objectively stupid. It makes no sense. It will cause essentially an internet meltdown the likes of which nobody has ever seen. EU legislators are worrying about 'Brexit'? How are you going to live if Google, Bing, Wikipedia, and every other search engine goes black? Or when your newspapers instantly go out of business because the legislation meant to protect them kills them? The issue of 'democracy' and even 'good intent' are secondary to the fact that the legislation is very materially and very damagingly stupid. This legislation is the equivalent of making chemical weapons in your own home as a 'fun experiment' and then dying from it ... Even beyond the damage the legislation could do - it makes the Commission look basically incompetent, and it erodes the goodwill that they need to stay alive, as Euroscepticism grows on the continent. How will the plebes react if even just wikipedia goes black for whatever reason? It would be like the internet version of a 'bread revolt'.

plainOldText 8y ago

The EU has already destroyed the web surfing experience for everyone, with their cookie laws. Now most sites require users to click on some banners that cover half of the screen on mobile, just to get to the content, on some random site they might only visit once. Argh! I wonder what they'll do next. At some point in the future we're going to need a "new internet".

Symbiote 8y ago
The ad industry destroyed web surfing. The EU just drew attention to that. Sites without tracking cookies don't need to show a cookie banner.
- nickpp 8y ago
  Ads were never as intrusive as that damn cookie/gdpr banner. In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    There are lots of sites without tracking cookies. HN doesn't set tracking cookies, for example. The only two cookies set are the cloudflare uid and a user login cookie, both of which are hardly meant for tracking.
    - Kiro 8y ago
      What about analytics?
      - zaarn 8y ago
        As long as analytics don't produce any personal data of an individual and only aggregate data or even anonymized data, it should be perfectly fine to do without any banner. Of course, if you use Google Analytics, you can't guarantee what Google is doing, so you'll need some banner to get consent before you can perform any analytics through GA (which means you need to disable GA until the user agrees, which barely any site does anyway). If you can guarantee that the analytics won't produce or store personal data, you don't need to disable it or produce a banner.

matt4077 8y ago

While this "link tax" is indeed rather stupid, the EFF is to a certain degree overstating their case. If you check the current proposals (http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-INIT/EN/pdf http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-I...) you will find (page 93) that the Council inserted a specific exemption for wikipedia and open source code. That's in addition to a few passages that had already been included previously, and that pretty clearly show that any requirement to collect from people linking to you only applies to large, commercial publishers. Many people attack this proposal with rather wild interpretations, often of the sort of hair-splitting non-lawyers consider very smart. Those usually just get a tired rolling of the eyes from judges. Real life is nothing but nuances, yet laws need to be abstract, and provide enough guidance to adequately capture future situations. Since it's impossible to make laws for every individual case (and actually illegal in many jurisdiction), there is no way around some ambiguity in the text. Closing that gap is the fundamental task of judges, and they actually have a pretty good track record of finding equatable outcomes. It's also worth to consider the problem the EU is trying to solve: journalism has seen its revenue crash by 50% to 75%, with the disappearance not just of readers, but classifieds and advertisers at the same time. Both in Europe and the US, local newspapers will be gone from vast swaths of the country. Those that remain are but shells of what they once were. Not having some professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session every week means citizen will be effectively cut off from accurate information about politics. Yet if you don't know what is happening, it's is impossible to make decisions in the voting booth. Without this essential loopback, politicians' career prospects become entirely divorced from their actions, rendering democracy meaningless. This current proposal seems to be far too convoluted, and enough of the fears are credible to make it look like a bad idea to me. But instead of spinning conspiracy theories of who paid whom, it would (have been) far more effective to try to find some other mechanism to ensure the survival of at least some journalism. One idea I've been bouncing around for far too many years is an ad blocker that is smart enough to block only ads that are annoying or dangerous. I am quite sure that there's a balance that reduces annoyances by 80% while having far less of an impact on revenue. If something like this had succeeded in easing some of the economic pressure, it would be far less likely that politicians feel the need to devote their time to such hard-handed measures such as link taxes.

8y ago

funkythings 8y ago

And people wonder why the brits voted Brexit.

carlmr 8y ago
While this might be a benefit of Brexit, I doubt this was at the top of the list of reasons for Brexit.
- sarcasmOrTears 8y ago
  People didn't vote for brexit because of this specific issue, but because the EU does crazy stuff like this costantly, in all industries.
  - gjm11 8y ago
    National governments do crazy stuff like this constantly too. They also do useful things. So does the EU. The case (or at least this case) against the EU is pretty much the same as the case against all governments. The right question isn't "does this organization do crazy things?" but "do the good things outweigh the bad, or the other way around?". The other thing is that I think a lot of the "EU does crazy things" narrative is deliberately, and dishonestly, pushed by people who are more interested in making the EU look bad than in the truth. (I am not suggesting that sarcasmOrTears is such a person: only that their perception of what the EU does may have been affected by the long-running Make The EU Look Bad campaign.)
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - jtbayly 8y ago
      But your own government answers to you. That’s what the Magna Carta was about. Also the US revolution.
      - gjm11 8y ago

elorant 8y ago

There are two possible outcomes from Article 11. Either it will backfire and large Internet networks like Google or Facebook will start removing links to news sites which will have the opposite result from what the latter where hopping when they were lobbying for a new copyright law, or it will kill the web as we know it at least in Europe. I'd put my money on the first scenario.

mrweasel 8y ago
Worst case is adding a little more bureaucracy. Google will stop listing news sites, or at least summaries. The number of visitors will crash and the news sites will be forced to give Google (and others) a free license to link to their content. It not going to be an issue, some newspapers already allow to access to articles for free is you come directly from a search engine. The part I find troubling is filtering user uploaded content, that's simply not going to work.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  I also wonder about your "(and others)" parenthesis - I don't immediately have reason to believe that that would be the case.
- Sebb767 8y ago
  We had the exact same situation in Germany already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_... In the end Google said "ok, then we'll stop listing you" and suddenly the publishers that wanted this law gave Google permission to link to them without cost. Sounds okay in theory, but every minor search engine or news aggregator which doesn't have the defacto monopoly of Google still suffers from it.
  - ru999gol 8y ago
    which then had the interesting effect of actually being great for Google, it will effectively prevent any competition of google news forever. Politicians are all corrupt/payed for, they have absolutely no concept of what they are doing and could not care less about its collateral damage.

esotericn 8y ago

If Google creates their own journalism arm, or some variant (e.g. YouTube for News), does that bypass this? Is the endgame of these EU laws full vertical integration, so you have one company paying itself, no 'third party cookie' because there's only a first party, etc?

tannhaeuser 8y ago

I'm with EFF on many things, but "link tax" is a non-starter for any serious discussion. There is no "tax" at all here, and the copyright reform isn't about "links". It's about clarifying the legal situation of search engines and news aggregators previewing large parts of other site's content, which has always been copyright infringement. "Link tax" FUD doesn't contribute.

martimarkov 8y ago
I mean they put up the definition from article 11 right there. Seems like a legit link tax to me.
- pas 8y ago
  I'm lost on their first excerpt (recital 32) and their interpretation about compulsory commercial license and how it kills Creative Commons. Maybe I'm slow but that quoted text implies no such things, so the EFF makes claims without backing them up (without properly doing the work of explain the steps of how they derived those consequences).
  - martimarkov 8y ago
    Well this text states exactly that: >> Such protection should be effectively guaranteed through the introduction, in Union law, of rights related to copyright for the reproduction and making available to the public of press publications in respect of digital uses in order to obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses. Which makes some sense. If you have a digital version that needs to still give you money but them: >> In addition, the listing in a search engine should not be considered as fair and proportionate remuneration. Says you will have to pay in a different from just driving traffic to those ppl. Now if I’m a Creative Commons news outlet there is no way for me to waive that extra payment. The law states that just listing me somewhere is not enough and I need to be paid in a different way. I may not want that but the law INSISTS that I get paid in a different way. Does this make it more clear?
    - 8y ago

throwaway775757 8y ago

EU countries don't need this shit. Follow the money to see who needs it. 1. It's Finland trying to get money out of the Dutch linking to news articles in Finnish ! 2. Or is it the Bulgarians linking to Romanian content ? 3. Oh, I know! It's the French trying to get rich out of German news articles ! Of course it's stupid. No EU country benefits in any way from this. These 'laws' are being pushed by the same hegemony 'multi-national' (mostly US?) media organizations that have been actively lobbying (bribing, corrupting, coercing) weak governments around Europe and the world. The ones that killed The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites, that forced countries like Spain into adopting idiotic copyright legislation, etc. -- That being said, I hope it passes. Actually I hope they pass a law which forces web sites to put up 500 different dialog boxes, overlays, "I agree" check boxes, "Continue" buttons which turn into spinners and never go away, that force you to watch ads and register an account, that auto play 20 videos and load 96MB of ads, so that it takes you 3 hours to get to the "news" article - a bunch of rumors dressed up as opinion or a well crafted PR article. News is addictive, useless informational fast food - it's unhealthy, it doesn't provide any useful information and it has one purpose - to brainwash people with ads. So fuck them, let the system eat itself from the inside. Good quality content will endure regardless of legislation. Resist, rebel, refuse to comply - go underground if necessary.

martimarkov 8y ago

I also love how most mainstream media does not report this or cover it at all. Yeah they might have the odd article but nothing else. I personally would be extremely happy, if this pile of shit passes, to see FB and google block all EU news outlets and drive them to the ground. I mean that should be the price to pay when meddling with the freedom of information. Having your revenue down by 50-60% (hopefully) because you’re dumb enough to think that your lobbying is the smartest idea sound like justice. I just can’t believe that the EU is actually doing this. It puts a really bad taste in my mouth that it tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because of large lobbyist corporations.

emiliobumachar 8y ago
If that could fall only on those who had an active role, however minor, in lobbying for this, than yes, it sounds like justice. But there will be too much collateral.
Devils_Avocado 8y ago
> I just can’t believe that the EU ... actually ... tries to regulate something it does not really understand just because... This is generally how government works! But it's even worse than usual in the EU, since it's an unaccountable transnational mega-bureaucracy; MEPs are not directly elected, they are appointed by their political party after proportional representation votes (which haven't had turnout higher than 50% since 1994). You think Congress is beholden to lobbyists now? Imagine how bad it'd be if state representatives could get "re-elected" each term without ever having to put their record to a public vote!
- martimarkov 8y ago
  Actually not 100% true with the MEPs because it's up to each individual member state. I think in Bulgaria you had to vote for a political party and a person from it. Then add proportianl representation and the ppl with the most votes in each party will go into the EP based on their respective % of the total votes. (idk if this makes sense as it might sound a bit confusing)

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ElectronShak 8y ago

the fact that individual news organisations can't even waive this right, really makes this look lobbied, because the lobbyist corporations will definitely look bad if the others choose to not charge this tax

aembleton 8y ago
Can't waive it, but they could charge €1 per year. I don't see why they couldn't do that.

jimnotgym 8y ago

This thread has gone way off topic. It had descended into general EU bashing and yet another GDPR debate.

guy98238710 8y ago

Why cannot we see how MEPs voted? Smearing them in local media for their votes would quickly put a stop to this and other nonsense being passed in EP. Without electronic vote tracking, MEPs are free to vote for lobbyists while sweet-talking the public.

craigsmansion 8y ago
You can: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fNONSGML%2bPV%2b20180912%2bRES-RCV%2bDOC%2bPDF%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f... A8-0245
- guy98238710 8y ago
  I see no vote data on amendments 89 and 90 that proposed removal of articles 11 and 13 respectively. Even this vote on the whole law is hard to find. Personally, I couldn't find it if you didn't post it here.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    Did you not see them in the ToC? Data for amendment 89 is on page 22 and amendment 90 is on page 26.
    - guy98238710 8y ago
      I see them now. Thanks. I wish there was a clean website where this information could be easily found by picking legislation on one side and MEPs on the other side.

guy98238710 8y ago

Trampling of open content is a part of wider tendency of governments everywhere in the world to suppress and reverse automation by passing labor-intensive laws and subsidizing labor-intensive businesses. Every time we make progress with automation, they invent more work for us to do. Open content is up to 100 times more popular. It therefore requires up to 100 times less work to satisfy demand. They just cannot let this happen. This follows from the strange ethic of valuing hard work over efficiency. Labor is sacred. Avoidance of work is considered amoral. Economic output is supposed to be split according to the amount of work done, at least in theory. Any other alternative is considered communist. In order to maintain this moral system, people must be made to work even if the work is useless or subversive.

anticensor 8y ago
> Avoidance of work is considered amoral. Did you mean immoral? Amoral means morals being not applicable, immoral means one who flouts morals.

guy98238710 8y ago

I wonder whether this will make blogs much more popular after search engines drop links to news sites.

guy98238710 8y ago

Isn't this against freedom of speech and thus against constitution in most member states? Nobody can stop me from disseminating my ideas free of charge, right?

rayiner 8y ago

Ads killed the web anyway, now we're just fighting over the corpse.

gimmeDatCheddar 8y ago

The politicians pushing that legislation really should face life in prison as the penalty. Absolutely atrocious.

josteink 8y ago

I support lots of initiatives from the EU resulting from the tech world being unable to self-regulate. This link-tax however is so extremely flawed, so obviously lobbied by special interest and just fundamentally backwards wrt how the www works... I can’t see how they think they’re going to win the public opinion to support or respect it.

realusername 8y ago
> I support lots of initiatives from the EU resulting from the tech world being unable to self-regulate. I agree for the GDPR but not with this copyright directive, it's a massive disaster lobbied by the large copyright holders.
- kmlx 8y ago
  my country's government (EU-based) uses GDPR in order to hide corrupt state employees from public scrutiny. last time it was used to hide identities of local police who were caught on tape causing grievous bodily harm to protesters. the state refused to name the culprits due to GDPR. the same GDPR is also currently used to turn people away from hospitals, as those require tens of pages of signatures in order for them to be able to treat you. does it matter to the state that they're abusing gdpr? to the contrary. they've just found another toy to fuck us over. meanwhile I'm not only abused by the state, but a bunch of US-based websites basically cut off europe from the rest of the world. in the end all I can say is that while I support the principle behind most EU ideas, the actual law that gets adopted is usually a far cry from what it should have been. also, this sort of naivety when it comes to the state power is still mind boggling. if you think google is bad, you have no idea.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    The problem is that the only way a lot of these EU regulations can get through is by general directive: the intents and goals are agreed upon as a group, the implementation is left to the individual state. You can imagine how impossible it would be to get all European countries to agree on anything otherwise. On top of that, a lot of these rules do really need to be adapted to local national contexts to makes sense. However, that also leaves plenty of room for exploitation, like the stuff you mentioned. I'm sorry to hear the GDPR is being abused this way.

hbogert 8y ago

This is so wrong that you almost start to think that the eff is somehow exaggerating this; they're probably not. The secrecy is the worst part. Democracies should be about openness. EU is arguably democratic and hardly open.

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isostatic 8y ago
The EU is usually open -- see the TTIP negotiations. The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote. If populists like Farage are in the parliament, that's only because people vote for them. Hardly undemocratic. The EU Council comprises the elected head of government of each member state. Hardly undemocratic. The EU Commission comprises a president, who is selected by the EU Council and approved or denied by the EU Parliament. The Council also appoints the members of the commission, each country appoints 1 person. In the UK this is no different to the PM appointing ministers. For this law to pass, not only does the parliament of elected MEPs have to pass it, but so does a majority of the Council, elected leaders. While it suits heads of various EU governemnts to blame 'the EU', it's entirely in their control to approve or reject the directive, and it's entirely in your MEP's control to approve or reject it.
- lixtra 8y ago
  > The EU Parliament is elected based on popular vote. Depending from which country you are from your vote may weight differently up to a factor of 11 (Luxembourg vs Spain) [1], hardly democratic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_Parliament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_...
  - PunchTornado 8y ago
    the same thing is happening in the US, right? big states like california vs smaller states like delaware. I think there is value into rules like these because otherwise smaller states will be always trumped.