> 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

> 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.