4 ms·

The problem is that a link tax is all backwards. For a physical anology, it's like if you have a new robotaxi company that drives to anywhere people want to go

The problem is that a link tax is all backwards. For a physical anology, it's like if you have a new robotaxi company that drives to anywhere people want to go very cheaply/easily, and this hurts the operators of short-haul flights when people figure they'd rather sleep in a car for 3 hours rather than dealing with airports, so your response is to force the robotaxi company to pay the short-haul flight operators for every trip to the airport in a way that's unprofitable for the robotaxis. The obvious response from the robotaxi is to stop providing rides to/from the airport. The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach.

jtode 3y ago
I agree this is the wrong way of going about it, but their response is ultimately a retreat, which will cause users to look elsewhere for their news headlines, and that will pretty much be it, cause I don't see the gov pulling back on that - in the final analysis I'm pretty sure they would like to have less people on there for their news, for obvious bloody reasons.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
belorn 3y ago
The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I am unsure what is the most appropriate way. Fair use laws was never designed with the idea of facebook copying news segments, search copying whole segments of websites and inline them, google making full copies of every page of every book, machine learning models, and so on. It also seem to have failed rather extremely with sites like youtube. All those cases of fair use also happens to only provide rights to large companies with hordes of lawyers. Anything smaller just get gunned down with copyright claims and strikes. I can imagine someone trying to write a bot that join every public facebook group and copy a snippet of every comment that is being made (with a helpful link if anyone want to read the full text) and publish that outside of facebook and their ads. How fast would that bot be kicked out by facebook?
- Marsymars 3y ago
  > The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I don't think it is; as far as I can tell, both the spirit and letter of the law is to require payment for links only, that include no content snippets. e.g. the bill's charter reads: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_... "Under the Bill, a digital news intermediary could make news content available by reproducing it or by facilitating access to the news content, including by generating links to news content. Facilitating access to news content could be done through any means, including by way of an index, aggregation or ranking, all of which are methods used by online platforms to organize and distribute news content." This also comes up in the clause-by-clause review: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meeting-57/evidence https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meetin... 1: "Facebook has said that they may consider removing the ability of news to be shared on their platform so that they cannot be scoped into this legislation. If they were to make that decision and Canadians wanted to take a quote from a newspaper article and post that quote on their Facebook page as a small snippet, would Facebook be allowed to permit that without being captured by this legislation?" 2: "[...]Regarding the example you give, in a context where Facebook has made the business decision to essentially prevent the ability of users to link to news articles but an individual is quoting from a particular news article without a link, no, I do not believe that would engage or trigger the application of the act." 1: "But as soon as a link is included, then they would be scoped into this legislation." 2: "From my perspective, the act of linking is a critical one. It boils down to the facilitation of access. Again, at the crux of this bill is a recognition that the ways that a significant number of Canadians navigate to news content is via social media services or via a search service, which involves clicking on the link. Yes." If the intention was for this law to apply to snippets rather than links, it should have been written that way, because as-is, it applies to links, and not snippets.
  - belorn 3y ago
    Interesting that the bill's charter indeed says that. However, according to the Legislative Summary of Bill C-18 (https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/441C18E https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...), it says: Clause 2(2) stipulates that news content is “made available” if two conditions are met: that it, or any portion of it, is reproduced; and that access to it is facilitated by “any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.” The word link or hyperlink is not mentioned a single time.
8note 3y ago
> The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach. I'm unclear how this is different than what you described. Taxing the replacement to subsidize the incumbents
- Marsymars 3y ago
  Because what they're doing isn't a general tax, it's taking an action that's already more beneficial to news organizations than it is to Facebook (linking to news), and making it less appealing for Facebook to continue this action. Please see the entirety of my original post in context, the part you quoted doesn't stand alone. The robotaxi analogy helps to illustrate the difference that your comment is alluding to.

jtode 3y ago

I agree this is the wrong way of going about it, but their response is ultimately a retreat, which will cause users to look elsewhere for their news headlines, and that will pretty much be it, cause I don't see the gov pulling back on that - in the final analysis I'm pretty sure they would like to have less people on there for their news, for obvious bloody reasons.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

belorn 3y ago

The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I am unsure what is the most appropriate way. Fair use laws was never designed with the idea of facebook copying news segments, search copying whole segments of websites and inline them, google making full copies of every page of every book, machine learning models, and so on. It also seem to have failed rather extremely with sites like youtube. All those cases of fair use also happens to only provide rights to large companies with hordes of lawyers. Anything smaller just get gunned down with copyright claims and strikes. I can imagine someone trying to write a bot that join every public facebook group and copy a snippet of every comment that is being made (with a helpful link if anyone want to read the full text) and publish that outside of facebook and their ads. How fast would that bot be kicked out by facebook?

Marsymars 3y ago
> The term "link tax" is always a bit of a misnomer. It is a tax for copying small snippets, which those companies would claim fair use on. I don't think it is; as far as I can tell, both the spirit and letter of the law is to require payment for links only, that include no content snippets. e.g. the bill's charter reads: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_1.html https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/charter-charte/c18_... "Under the Bill, a digital news intermediary could make news content available by reproducing it or by facilitating access to the news content, including by generating links to news content. Facilitating access to news content could be done through any means, including by way of an index, aggregation or ranking, all of which are methods used by online platforms to organize and distribute news content." This also comes up in the clause-by-clause review: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meeting-57/evidence https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/CHPC/meetin... 1: "Facebook has said that they may consider removing the ability of news to be shared on their platform so that they cannot be scoped into this legislation. If they were to make that decision and Canadians wanted to take a quote from a newspaper article and post that quote on their Facebook page as a small snippet, would Facebook be allowed to permit that without being captured by this legislation?" 2: "[...]Regarding the example you give, in a context where Facebook has made the business decision to essentially prevent the ability of users to link to news articles but an individual is quoting from a particular news article without a link, no, I do not believe that would engage or trigger the application of the act." 1: "But as soon as a link is included, then they would be scoped into this legislation." 2: "From my perspective, the act of linking is a critical one. It boils down to the facilitation of access. Again, at the crux of this bill is a recognition that the ways that a significant number of Canadians navigate to news content is via social media services or via a search service, which involves clicking on the link. Yes." If the intention was for this law to apply to snippets rather than links, it should have been written that way, because as-is, it applies to links, and not snippets.
- belorn 3y ago
  Interesting that the bill's charter indeed says that. However, according to the Legislative Summary of Bill C-18 (https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/441C18E https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/Resear...), it says: Clause 2(2) stipulates that news content is “made available” if two conditions are met: that it, or any portion of it, is reproduced; and that access to it is facilitated by “any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content.” The word link or hyperlink is not mentioned a single time.

8note 3y ago

> The appropriate way for the government to do this is to slap a general corporate tax on Facebook, and then subsidize news agencies out of general revenue, not this convoluted/backwards link tax approach. I'm unclear how this is different than what you described. Taxing the replacement to subsidize the incumbents

Marsymars 3y ago
Because what they're doing isn't a general tax, it's taking an action that's already more beneficial to news organizations than it is to Facebook (linking to news), and making it less appealing for Facebook to continue this action. Please see the entirety of my original post in context, the part you quoted doesn't stand alone. The robotaxi analogy helps to illustrate the difference that your comment is alluding to.