
The EU's Link Tax Will Kill Open Access and Creative Commons News - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill-open-access-and-creative-commons-news
======
martimarkov
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.

~~~
hoaw
I think the EU understands perfectly fine. It is the Internet that doesn't
understand how copyright works. Most countries don't have comprehensive fair
use. Copyright rules and e.g. quotation rights are fairly 'weak' exceptions.
Various people and organization, like Lawrence Lessig and the Pirate Party,
have advocated for reform. Companies like Google and Facebook have instead
basically made it their business to abuse copyright, which especially online
most people seem happy with. Unfortunately reality tends to catch up with you
and 2018 is turning out to be the year when grace period on how to operate the
Internet is running out.

~~~
driverdan
I downvoted you because linking and showing a few sentences does not mean a
company's business is to "abuse copyright."

~~~
dangjc
Google shows a lot more than a link and increasingly is tailored to answer
your question and prevent you from going to the site that provided the
information in the first place.

~~~
danShumway
> is tailored to answer your question

In the US, factual information can not be copyrighted.

I believe it can in the EU, although I might be misrepresenting their official
stance. At the very least, I'm pretty sure that the EU allows you to copyright
databases. I'm sure EU residents can correct me if I'm missing some kind of
subtlety.

At least in the US though, there is nothing remotely illegal about looking up
a fact on a website and then giving it to someone else directly, even if that
diverts traffic away from the original site. Copyright was never intended to
cover stuff like that.

------
josteink
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.

~~~
dageshi
Well, that is the double edged sword. For two decades or more we enjoyed an
internet that was more or less free from regulation because the politicians of
the era didn't really use it or understand it. Now the politicians do use it
(I doubt they understand it) and are happy to regulate it, I imagine we can
expect much more like this from the EU.

~~~
Tsubasachan
Double edged sword indeed. Without regulation the internet turned into shit
and we have companies like Google and Facebook running the show.

~~~
ekianjo
> Google and Facebook running the show.

It only runs the show if you let them. You can still live outside of the
Google/Facebook world happily.

~~~
Xylakant
No, you can’t. Not unless you stop living in Europe or the US or any other
place that has internet. I don’t have a Facebook account, but I’m certain
Facebook knows all it needs to know from friends who shared pictures and
tagged me, from people who uploaded their address book which included my phone
number, from companies that uploaded my data as part of a targeted audience
list. You cannot opt out of this part of the data collection. And all the
policies that Facebook promotes, all the social dialogue it shapes, this
affects me, too. I cannot possibly opt out of that either.

~~~
robin_reala
Facebook under GDPR isn’t allowed to create a shadow profile of EU citizens:
all consent has to be opt-in. OK, so they could have some legitimate interest
argument, but I find it hard to believe that’d fly in an EU court. They’re
also not allowed to use the consent of your associates to process your
personal information without your own opt-in consent. So it’s going to be
interesting when the first court case with Facebook as a defendant against the
GDPR happens.

~~~
Xylakant
Let’s see if that happens, but that’s tangential to the point. The GP was
asserting that you can just ignore Facebook/Google and that act alone will
remove all (ill) effect it might have on your life. I’m asserting this is
false. If that effect is reduced by regulation, then this is the opposite of
ignorance, it’s actively shaping what these actors can and cannot do.

------
tannhaeuser
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
I mean they put up the definition from article 11 right there. Seems like a
legit link tax to me.

~~~
pas
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
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?

~~~
jimnotgym
And a fair and proportionate amount for Creative Commons article is presumably
zero?

~~~
martimarkov
True but with an explicit arrangement.

------
esotericn
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?

------
hbogert
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.

~~~
isostatic
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
> 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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_Parliament)

~~~
PunchTornado
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.

~~~
lixtra
This is not true for the Congress which is the comparable institution to the
European Parliament.

    
    
      Each state is apportioned a number of seats which 
      approximately corresponds to its share of the aggregate 
      population of the 50 states. 
      ... The method of equal proportions minimizes the
      percentage differences in the populations of the 
      congressional districts. [1]
    

Some outliers exist, because states are guaranteed at least one seat (compare
that with 6 for Luxembourg)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_apportionment)

~~~
PunchTornado
I don't get your point. you say it is not true and then you agree that some
outliers exist. this is exactly the point, that there are outliers like this
in US Congress, just like there are in the EU parliament. Probably the value
is higher in the EU, but I think that's fair to protect the smaller states.

~~~
isostatic
His argument is that the 11:1 ratio of MEPs is not democratic, but the 2:1
ratio of Congress is democratic.

The UK has a system, widely known as democratic, where the government of the
day (with the exception of 2010), does not have the support of the voting
population. In 2015 David Cameron and his Tory party got 100% of power in
Parliament, and thus 100% of power in the executive, based on 36.9% of the
voting public.

The U.S presidential elections are also classed as democratic, despite that
twice in the last 20 years more people have voted for a different candidate
than the one who became president.

(It's actually worse than 11:1 ratio -- Podlaskie and Warmian-Masurian has
1.3m voters per MEP, Malta has 70,000, that's a 19:1 ratio)

However I've never heard people complain that Malta, Luxemboug, Slovenia,
Cyprus etc hold the cards, people always complain it's Germany and the UK that
call the shots.

~~~
PunchTornado
also each vote cast in Wyoming is worth 3.6 as much as the same vote cast in
California. still less than in the EU.

------
elorant
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
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.

~~~
Sebb767
We had the exact same situation in Germany already:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers)

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
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.

------
sonnyblarney
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.

~~~
titanix2
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.

~~~
josefx
> 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
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.

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

------
guy98238710
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
You can:

[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fNONSGML%2bPV%2b20180912%2bRES-
RCV%2bDOC%2bPDF%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN)

A8-0245

~~~
guy98238710
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
Did you not see them in the ToC? Data for amendment 89 is on page 22 and
amendment 90 is on page 26.

~~~
guy98238710
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.

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

------
plainOldText
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
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
Ads were never as intrusive as that damn cookie/gdpr banner.

In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.

~~~
mverwijs
> Ads were never as intrusive as that damn cookie/gdpr banner.

The poison slipped into your morning coffee is also less intrusive than the
antidote shot into your arm with a syringe.

> In case you didn't know, there are no sites without tracking cookies.

And thanks to the GDPR, they might make a comeback now.

~~~
nickpp
I'm afraid in this case the antidote was worse than the disease.

GDPR is here already and the solution chosen by websites is either the
obnoxious banner or blocking Europe. No cookie-less I am afraid...

~~~
toxik
So ban the EU then. The market will find another venue if the service is
useful enough.

If a website is obnoxious about its GDPR compliancy, I just close it.
Coincidentally, it has never happened on something I really needed (technical
documentation, scientific journals, etc.)

I don't necessarily agree with how the GDPR was created, or maybe even why,
but to say it's worse than the information tyranny being built in the world
today? Pft.

------
guy98238710
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?

------
guy98238710
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
> Avoidance of work is considered amoral.

Did you mean immoral? Amoral means morals being not applicable, immoral means
one who flouts morals.

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

------
guy98238710
I wonder whether this will make blogs much more popular after search engines
drop links to news sites.

------
ElectronShak
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
Can't waive it, but they could charge €1 per year. I don't see why they
couldn't do that.

------
matt4077
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-I...](http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-12513-2018-INIT/EN/pdf))
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.

~~~
buboard
> professionals who show up at the 8am city council planning session

The promise of the internet was that we wouldn't need this person because we
have direct access to the city council session, and it has largely delivered.
The tech is there for the city council to make its sessions public. It is
transparency that killed the journalist, not google.

~~~
astrobe_
That was my thought (the city council session should be on the web) at first,
but I believe a person is still needed to make a summary, to explain certain
things (sometimes people use lingo or refer to things you might not know),
verify claims, etc.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me I have just described the job of a
journalist.

~~~
buboard
Or of a reddit commenter. Or of an HN commenter. Or a peer reviewer. Or a blog
poster. There is a wide selection nowadays. No need to channel everything
through a handful of individuals.

~~~
Faark
Or a facebook post. Or a russian twitter bot. None of them you can trust. All
of those selected for you to see by algorithms.

And you really want to tell me this is no different or definitively better
than the last century's news systems? Or even that we understand what impacts
the switch to social media will have?

~~~
jtbayly
Certainly it’s no worse than this century’s news system, which produces, as
far as I can tell, journalists that do exactly the same thing.

Find a source you know (through research and watching over time) you can trust
and read them, whether they publish in Reddit or USAToday. That’s something
you can do today that wasn’t really possible before.

------
funkythings
And people wonder why the brits voted Brexit.

~~~
carlmr
While this might be a benefit of Brexit, I doubt this was at the top of the
list of reasons for Brexit.

~~~
sarcasmOrTears
People didn't vote for brexit because of this specific issue, but because the
EU does crazy stuff like this costantly, in all industries.

~~~
rcxdude
Honestly, having read many EU standards, they are usually some of the most
sensible, reasonable legislation you could ask, on both the consumer and
producer side. Most silliness that gets blamed on them is either willfull
misinterpretation of the rules ('EU says banana must be straight!'. No, EU
says bananas must not be misshapen (by, for example, having a 90 degree bend
in the middle of an otherwise normally shaped banana) if they are to be
classed above a certain grade), or excessive risk aversion on the part of
companies (usually driven by lawyers).

~~~
jtbayly
Like GDPR, where they claim like lunatics that their laws apply to every
business in the world?

I don’t care how well-meaning or reasonable sounding their laws generally are.
They clearly don’t have a clue.

~~~
rcxdude
They claim their law applies to their citizens. Especially on the internet,
where a company can be 'based' wherever will regulate them the least, this is
a reasonable compromise.

~~~
jtbayly
Wrong. A law that applies to their citizens would be a law forbidding their
citizens from doing business with companies with crappy privacy policies.

