
EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line - walterbell
https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-finish-line/
======
jsnell
I had not realized that this insane bit with an inalienable right to monetary
remuneration had made it to the drafts. We already know from the past cases
that if given the choices between paying for the privilege of linking vs. not
linking at all, search engines and social networks will do the latter. The
economic value of e.g. news searches must be miniscule.

But maybe there is a little bit of value there, even if not a ton. So one can
maybe imagine a Google or a Facebook signing a deal with a couple of
publishers per country. It's just that the marginal utility of additional
publications will go down very quickly. Most publications will a) not get paid
for the links, since they're not linked to b) not get any traffic, and lose a
large chunk of their ad revenue as well.

It absolutely boggles the mind that anyone would think this is a good idea.
Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would
like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off.

~~~
speedplane
There are a few less obvious reasons why you wouldn't want to allow people to
link to your content:

\- Privacy: You want to be in control of how the information on your site is
procured. This is common on government sites that generally allow public
access, but require all sorts of forms and certifications to gain that access.

\- Competition: If you are competing with Google or another to create the
user's initial landing page, you would reasonably want to prevent them to
access your own landing page content.

\- Trust/Reputation: Google tries to link to as many pages as it can, but it
can't link to them all. If your goal is to provide a trusted comprehensive
service, you may want to deter "easy" but "non-comprehensive" access to your
content. For example, it's conceivable that a medical journal would prevent
access because Google only indexes 40% of it's content, and end users may
develop a false (and potentially deadly) understanding that Google is
comprehensive.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Absolutely, but not getting linked to has always been an option.

Publishers want Google to link to their content. At the same time they want
Google to pay for the honor and prevent competitors from letting Google link
to their content for free.

The only reason this ridiculously brazen set of demands doesn't get laughed
out of the room is that these publishers have tremendous political clout.

~~~
kuschku
The big issue is that Google over time has moved to scrape the web.

One big thing Google has done recently is they extract what you search for
from a website, and show it inline.

E.g. when I search for a recipe, I get the result in the Google search, and
don’t need to visit their website.
[https://i.k8r.eu/aILGEg](https://i.k8r.eu/aILGEg)

Google extracts reviews from Yelp!, and I can read them without visiting
Yelp!.

They’re doing this for everything, and AMP furthers this.

Google is trying to keep the user as long as possible on Google, and show
snippets instead of letting users leave.

As result many of these sites lose out on ad impressions, and money.

Google has no way to disable this feature short of entire unlisting your site.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I can see the problem with that. But as I understand it the proposed "link
tax" is not limited to this sort of thing.

~~~
kuschku
Yeah, it’s why I hate the law as it is, but I can obviously also understand
why Google seems like a threat to the actors behind this.

------
nickpp
As public regulators all over the world are busy pushing regulations (what
else? that is their sole job after all) maybe it is time to stop and ask: are
we losing more than we are gaining?

Everything has a price and free markets are the only mechanism for determining
that price. But regulations overwrite that price with one determined by
politics and lobby and populism. This new price is paid by all no matter if we
want to or not.

So the question is: is it worth it? I make this kind of cost analysis in my
life every day. But is it anybody doing them at the society level? As the
costs of regulations add up so does the cost of the product. Can, we, as a
society, afford it? Or maybe we are pawning our future to pay for these
imposed costs today?

~~~
mikeash
This seems like a greatly oversimplified view of things. Regulations are
tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them.

If the bad regulations outweigh the good, the solution isn’t to give up on
regulation, it’s to cut the bad ones.

It doesn’t make sense to lump together regulations on the acceptable amount of
lead in drinking water, regulations on operations of a commercial airline, and
regulations on customer data.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how
> you use them.

It's not just that though. There are good and bad regulations in the sense
that the law against murder is good and DMCA 1201 is bad, but there are also
compliance costs for any regulation, even good ones.

Economic transactions have a certain amount of surplus. The value of doing
something is $100 and the cost of doing it is $20, so we do it and gain $80
worth of surplus.

Compliance costs consume part of the surplus. Maybe it costs $5 more but we
gain $10 in positive externalities, so it's worth it from a societal
perspective. (But not from the perspective of the parties or we wouldn't need
a regulation to get them to do it.)

The problem comes when you start stacking them. $25 is still less than $100.
$50 is less than $100. $90 is less than $100. But at $101 people stop
participating in the transaction and you lose the whole stack. All the
benefits of the transaction, to everyone, including the positive externalities
the regulations were intended to provide, are lost.

This is true even if every regulation is individually justifiable. There comes
a point when the compliance costs exceed the economic surplus available to
cover them. It doesn't matter if the regulations have nothing to do with each
other, they can still conspire to destroy the thing they were supposed to be
improving.

~~~
oldcynic
But you make that argument like there's a fixed pot of money to go around. $25
to spend on regulation, but tough our ancestors already regulated speed limits
and copyright so you can't have any more. Pity about the environment and data
privacy but hey.

Thing is there's been a fair bit of growth since my childhood, or even since
the widespread adoption of the www. Just compare the sheer amount of crap
people have compared to a child of even the 90s. Plenty of slack left for some
regulation and changes without even the cost of compliance of 20 years ago -
there's so much more money in the system.

If a business is so marginal that it can't cope with a change in interest
rates or a new regulation or tax rate then any number of other tiny events
would have sunk it anyway.

Note: Not to say I in any way agree with this poorly thought out piece of
proposed regulation - it needs a similar response to that given to ACTA.

~~~
Silhouette
_But you make that argument like there 's a fixed pot of money to go around._

Well, usually there is. For example, I have a business that should be in a
good position to take on its first "real" employees right now. We have the
opportunity to take on more work, which would bring in more revenue, which
would both boost our profits and create decent paying work for the extra
staff. Surely these are all good things from a productivity and economic point
of view. But we aren't doing any of that, as a direct result of the time,
money and extra risk that would be involved. Obviously an employee has to
generate more benefit for the business than it costs to employ them or it's
not worth hiring, and that's your "fixed pot of money" in the case of
employment regulations.

 _If a business is so marginal that it can 't cope with a change in interest
rates or a new regulation or tax rate then any number of other tiny events
would have sunk it anyway._

That's true. For a lot of new or very small businesses, one bit of significant
bad luck _can_ sink them. Hopefully they will grow beyond that to become more
established and robust to minor setbacks, but that takes time and it doesn't
just happen automatically. In the meantime, every adverse change in taxes or
fees or regulatory overheads really can be a serious problem.

------
fanzhang
I hope this dies just like many laws the US tries to pass on regulating the
Internet in a way that promotes special interests versus that of the public
good.

But as a thought experiment, if you were a lawyer tasked to argue this was
publicly good, what could you even say? Content creators deserve money for
creating content. Aggregators are stealing some of that value and that's
inefficient but currently unenforceable? .... I just can't even think of
another reason.

Maybe this is protectionism (both nationally and of existing enterprises).
French publications are upset they can't get more of the pie from Google who
is US based. EU publications in general are upset that aggregation theory (
[https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-
theory/](https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/) ) has taken hold
and distributors like publishers are getting wiped out.

This will surely accelerate a trend that Google is already doing _without_
monetary incentive: creating their own content and putting in on top.

~~~
kd5bjo
> But as a thought experiment, if you were a lawyer tasked to argue this was
> publicly good, what could you even say?

The primary economic value of many news articles is provided by timeliness and
one or two key facts, even if they appear in a longer piece. By including a
copy of those facts adjacent to the article link, the linking party is taking
that value without actually doing the work of journalism. Copyright is a
mechanism that is already in place to deal with undesirable distribution of an
author's work, so the simple solution is to extend its protection to even tiny
parts of journalistic writing.

------
bo1024
Ignoring what the laws are actually about, GDPR and copyright are similar in
this: one entity gets legal control over others' use of certain information.
But while the privacy law is aimed at allowing individuals to assert some
control over companies, the expansion of copyright is used by companies to
assert control over individuals.

~~~
nickpp
Don't forget that companies are made of people and an individual is a company
of 1.

GDPR is pretty much DRM for an individual's personal data.

~~~
beevai142
> Don't forget that companies are made of people

This is totally irrelevant, because the governance model of a a company is a
limited dictatorship, and not all those people are equal. A company is only
the people at its top, the rest are chattel.

A company is also not made of people in the legal sense, it is a separate
entity.

~~~
nickpp
That is BS. You are talking about businesses as if all you know about them is
from Hollywood movies.

I suggest you go ahead and build a company, any company. You may learn how
things really work, not the evil caricature you have in your mind. It's not
that hard and it’s quite rewarding.

------
toyg
This is why EUParliament exists: to keep national elites, embodied in the
Council and Commission, in check. This is one of those instances where MEPs
can shine by holding the line against idiotic regulation. Call your MEPs and
let them know this is a chance for them to get visibility by doing The Right
Thing, voting down this crap. And if they reply with boilerplate, make sure
you vote a different party next time - the proportional nature of EU elections
makes it easy for smaller parties to benefit from small swings in numbers.

------
pjc50
Can we direct some of the GDPR ire at this please, because this is (a)
genuinely bad for everyone except a few legacy publishers and (b) not yet
finalised?

------
pdkl95
From the associated article about this supposed "link tax".

> Anyone using snippets of journalistic online content must first get a
> license from the publisher.

Re-publishing a portion of a published work is _not_ a "link". A link is only
a reference (address) where something (e.g. a published work) may be found,
which _not_ part of the work itself. Displaying a portion of work _might_ be
an allowed "fair use"? (I only know US copyright law; the EU may have very
different laws about when it is "fair" to bypass copyr8ight and use part of a
work)

However, it is important to remember that (at least in US-like jurisdiction)
that the amount of work included in a snippet is one of several features used
when judging if a use is "fair". Another important question is if the use
affects the market for the original work. An academic paper that quotes
snippets from an article is probably fair (nobody would read the paper _as a
substitute_ for reading the original article), while an aggregator using the
_same snippets_ may not be a fair use if people are reading the aggregator to
read the article _instead_ of continuing to the original publisher. In
general, each case probably requires judge to rule if a specific use is
"fair".

> Because readers need to know what a link leads to before clicking, sites
> almost always include a snippet of the linked-to content as part of a link.

This is deliberately attempting to conflate re-publication with a hyperlink.
Link previews are not needed, are not used for the vast majority of links on
the web. Claiming that previews are "almost always" included is patently a
lie.

Should it be necessary, this kind of feature is better implemented in the user
agent. I'm fairly certain I saw link prefetch+preview extensions for Firefox
~10 years ago.

> Small publishers disadvantaged: Aggregators create a level playing field for
> independent publishers with less brand recognition to reach audiences.

Did Google or FB write this doublespeak? Allowing aggregators to republish
copyright protected works benefits the big players by allowing them to steal
existing markets.

~~~
jpetso
> Should it be necessary, this kind of feature is better implemented in the
> user agent. I'm fairly certain I saw link prefetch+preview extensions for
> Firefox ~10 years ago.

I'd rather avoid that; sending fingerprintable information to random websites
linked from e.g. a search result page or an article seems like a great way to
unnecessarily expose myself to being tracked and abused in all kinds of ways.

~~~
kuschku
Providing a <a href="..." prefetch> wouldn't give any tracking capability that
<iframe ...> doesn't already give.

~~~
charleslmunger
That's true, but I don't know of anyone who does link previews via iframe.

------
bitL
Seems like the past 15 years were once-in-history-and-never-again blip where
we had some illusion of building a better society. Oh well, my face goes back
under the stamping boot...

~~~
pacnard
Probably there have been some other times like this, but we forgot them

~~~
walterbell
We need a list. Early days of amateur radio? Print?

~~~
bitL
Maybe. But those required quite a lot of money or rare resources, so while
they were supporting emerging classes that could afford it, only Internet
allowed almost everyone to have a voice (well, OK, still most of the Earth's
population has problems surviving, so we aren't there yet).

------
shiado
If the sites don't want the traffic from links that drive their revenue then
why don't they identify the servers which are prefetching content and IP ban
them and file abuse complaints. They probably have very identifiable User-
Agent strings.

Also this link tax reminds me that I think browser vendors should provide
better privacy options for removing the referer header from link requests to
prevent tracking.

~~~
reaperducer
_> They probably have very identifiable User-Agent strings_

Yes. Because bots never change or spoof their user agents.

~~~
beagle3
"link tax" is aimed at mature aggregators and search engines, someone you can
actually sue. GoogleBot, BingBot and friends do not change or spoof their user
agents.

~~~
reaperducer
If you think being a large company means its user agent doesn't change, you
haven't been monitoring user agents very long.

The fact that you choose to use Bing as an example proves my point. Bing is
only eight years old. Before that it identified itself as msnbot.

~~~
beagle3
Wow. Once in 8 years. Quite a point you have there /s

Every single respectable search engines (which can be targets of lawsuits, and
are thus targeted by this law) has proper identification.

If a content owner worries so much that their data might be available
somewhere (search engine, aggregator, ...) they did not approve, they should
whitelist rather than blacklist.

They can (and should) also whitelist/blacklist at the referrer level.

But a law actually lets them have it both ways; They only sue those that they
dislike, after the fact, letting others keep linking. At least that's the
thinking - in practice, if such a law is written (which has happened before),
Google, Facebook and others will drop those sources that don't give the info
for free, those sources will see their numbers drop 90% over a month, and come
back begging to be reindexed.

I find it quite infuriating that laws are being put into place for problems
which already have a very simple and precise technical solution.

~~~
reaperducer
_Wow. Once in 8 years. Quite a point you have there /s_

You sound young.

It's not unusual for serious code to run for decades without modification. The
less it has to be touched, the better it was made from the start.

~~~
beagle3
I have been programming professionally for nearly three decades now. I know
that some 24 year old code of mine is still running, essentially unmodified,
at the company I worked for at the time. And now that you got off my lawn ...

I fail to see what you are trying to say. That a change once in 8 years in a
user agent string is too frequent? Because that seems to be what you are
saying. And if that is what you are saying, I don't think we have any common
ground to base the discussion on.

------
anoncow
GDPR and the proposed copyright laws will break the internet irrecoverably.

The start-up industry will be a long forgotten dream.

These old b@$%%%s will turn the internet into cable television.

Scumbags would want to go back to a world of slavery, colonisation and wealth
locked up as gold in personal treasuries.

I hope all the other countries follow suit and then the only thing we will be
able to aim for is a job in these government bodies or the few surviving
monopolies.

Sorry for my language.

~~~
beagle3
Why do you (and others) lump GDPR with this law? There is nothing common to
them.

Other than people who actually profit of personal data, I have not met one
person who isn't in favor of the GDPR. This law is different.

~~~
Ygg2
There's one thing in common. Money required to obey them. And while GDPR can
be somewhat avoided, how in the everloving name of Christ, can you avoid
linking without horribly distorting the basic principles of the Web?

~~~
beagle3
GDPR requires money to comply if you weren’t already compliant, yes - and at
the extreme, it might even kill your business completely if your business
isn’t gdpr compatible. But that’s a transient effect.

It is similar to an ordinance saying “starting tomorrow, you may not dump your
sewage in the sea”. It might cost you to get proper disposal services, and if
your business _was_ about disposing to the sea, you’ll probably have to close
shop.

But new houses wont dispose to the sea in the first place. And it will be
better for everyone.

~~~
Ygg2
GDPR sure.

But link tax and upload monitor? How do you avoid that? Never link to anything
and never allow any uploads? What about comments, they could contain important
excerpt from some book owned by EU publishers.

------
Reason077
These kinds of laws are symptomatic of the democratic deficit that exists in
the EU. These days, the commission can pretty much push through any crazy law
it likes. Because no-one is paying any attention.

~~~
kuschku
And the worst part is, ALL the heads of states of EU nations are in support of
this law. The council approves of it.

This means that even if you’d end the EU, these same people would still be
able to pass the law.

~~~
Reason077
The EU commission can get away with things that individual nations can not,
because they are not subject to the same level of public scrutiny.

If a controversial law is proposed in a national parliament, then it becomes
big news. A politician pushing an unpopular agenda would eventually find
him/herself voted out.

But average people don't usually hear about laws the EU is creating until
they're implemented. Hardly anyone had heard of the GDPR until it was too
late. And the whole legislative process of the commission is opaque: you can't
tell who in your government was responsible for supporting a particular
position.

~~~
kuschku
Yeah, that’s the one big issue with the EU - the fourth power, the media, is
missing. There’s no discussion, no involvement of the public, neither the good
nor bad is shown when it happens.

Instead, 4 years later, the same national politicians that wrote the law blame
it on the "undemocratic" EU.

------
MrEldritch
At this point, I'm just exhausted. I'm tired of fighting this battle that we
lose every single step of the way. I kind of just want privacy, expression,
user safety, and free speech on the web to be dead already so we can skip the
inevitable grinding progression of crushing defeats as it dies bit after bit
as we expend massive amounts of effort, will, emotion, and stress campaigning
against the latest in a long line of stupid ideas only to see the ratchet
progress one tooth further.

The Web is on life support. It's not going to survive. I just wish we could
pull the plug already instead of watching it die in slow motion like this.

~~~
arpa
The fight is far from over. We still have crypto. If that is outlawed, we'll
have steganography. When that's outlawed, well, we'll still have sneakers.
Iron curtain and Stalins' organs failed. Stasi failed. War on drugs is
failing. We, the people, shall prevail. Have hope, brother.

~~~
MrEldritch
A niche, encrypted deep-web for cypherpunks to serve as a channel for La
Resistance(tm) would be a web that had already lost any actual reason to use
it.

I use the Web to talk to people, learn things, and explore cool stuff other
people made. If those other people aren't using the niche crypto/stegano
services, then what am I going to use them for?

Yes, there will always be _some_ way to have privacy online, if you're beardy
enough and avoid using most popular consumer technology in favor of homegrown
hackerly solutions. But a Web without the network effect is a Web that's no
good at all for almost all the reasons I care. It'll be good for dissension,
semi-legal activity, dubious porn, safety ... there's plenty of times that
people need true privacy and security. But when your network's _only_ good for
that, then it'll still be dead in all the other ways that made the Internet so
amazing.

~~~
arpa
People made copies of "forbidden" material on x-ray photos. There was samisdat
(underground press). There were anticommunist anecdotes told at night in
soviet kitchens. And somehow these people managed to do that without explicit
permission of their government, and even under the proespect of severe
punishment: incarceration, torture, labor camps and death penalty in extreme
cases. Thing is, it was worth it for people who did that. Now, ask yourself:
is the web as important to you that you would start using deep web,
steganographics, etc., or are you just a consumer who just needs mass
production? Because facebook and google and their services are here to stay:
they're bigger than china and you need not worry about them; me - over the
years of them fighting the web it has lost only one thing: its' individual
freedom. Thing that you call the network effect, i call the tvisation of the
web: there are no blogs, no self-hosted material, no homepages, only content
"channels" owned by the select few: facebook and google. It has, for me, no
appeal of the early, wondrous thing, only ad-riddled cancer. And so, my
friend, the web is already dead in that aense, but it will continue evolving,
and what i hope for is that some iteration of niche cyberpunk web will bring
back the wondrous thing that was before.

------
whatshisface
Could websites exempt themselves from link tax renumeration in an automatic
way with something like a robots.txt?

------
HappyDreamer
What if Google reacts by showing ads, as the first 20 search results, instead
of normal search hits? (in Europe.)

If "normal" search results, become expensive to Google.

------
scribu
Playing devil’s advocate: What if the link tax will replace advertising as the
main source or revenue for publishers? Wouldn’t that be a Good Thing (TM)?

~~~
greglindahl
Coming up next: European publishers discover that search engines
preferentially link non-European publishers due to the link tax.

Coming up after that: More unexpected effects.

~~~
Silhouette
_Coming up after that: More unexpected effects._

Which presumably most of us in Europe won't hear about, if all the sites with
a link/discussion format like HN and Reddit will be faced with paying huge
fees or stopping/geoblocking/etc...

~~~
IanCal
I'm not sure why HN would be affected, there's no link previews or anything
pulled from the article. Links themselves do not seem to be a problem if I
understand right:

> This protection does not extend to acts of hyperlinking which do not
> constitute communication to the public.

section 33, page 19.
[http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/1-2016...](http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/1-2016-593-EN-F1-1.PDF)

~~~
Silhouette
_I 'm not sure why HN would be affected_

It's not the link's address that is the problem under the questionable
proposals, but rather the text that describes it. HN's normal custom is to use
the original title/headline for that description, and HN's own mods actively
change submissions that don't follow that policy. It looks like that could
easily get them caught in the same trap as a site like Google that offers
accompanying snippets.

Maybe YC would be willing to accept the risk of publishers trying to extract
money from them, just as running HN itself is a favour to the community, but I
see no good reason they should be _expected_ to put up with that risk and any
actual costs incurred just to continue providing a useful service that they
already generously provide for free.

------
lucio
I believe country names in the article should be replacex by "x bureaucrats",
e.g.

* Germany is standing in the way of an agreement over what the “link tax” should cover (see above).

* Austria and Italy want to extend the duration of the “link tax”.

Should be:

* Germany bureaucrats are standing in the way of an agreement over what the “link tax” should cover (see above).

* Austria and Italy bureaucrats want to extend the duration of the “link tax”.

------
Improvotter
Yay Belgium makes it better! Go Belgium!

------
fnord123
GDPR is great. Link Tax is shit. The EU is perfectly balanced. As it should
be.

------
techsin101
Here we go... Internet will soon be completely segerated by regions, clutched
by regulations and policies, and under few.

Soon to make a blog you'd need to hire 30 developers and 40 lawyers to cover
specific legal issues of China, Russia, USA, EU, India, UAE, and so on.

You'd have to apply for University Grant to open a blog on diy cleaning.

------
cJ0th
Is there anything a simple citizen can do to prevent these ideas from becoming
laws?

------
bryanrasmussen
So how would this affect Hacker News?

------
exembly
[deleted]

~~~
Silhouette
This seems a highly unusual approach. Does it achieve anything at all? At
least in the UK, our convention is normally that representatives only deal
with their own constituents, and we have a set of MEPs for each geographical
region. If you're in the UK, you can identify and contact yours via
WriteToThem:

[https://www.writetothem.com/](https://www.writetothem.com/)

------
fairpx
It would be great if all these new regulations only applied to companies of X
size. Scrappy startups with no access to good lawyers and understanding of
these regulations are more likely to suffer vs the big guys who were the cause
of all of these changes in the first place.

~~~
greglindahl
I'm an advisor to several startup European search engines which are likely to
be annihilated by the combination of these changes and the GDPR.

~~~
pjc50
Who would start a new search engine in this day and age? You'd need some
really unique features which Google can't duplicate, and the only one which
seems to have made it is DDG with their privacy promise.

~~~
merinowool
So that the access to information is more democratic? What stops Google from
suppressing certain information at the request of bureaucrats or corporations?
When you have a choice you are more likely to see information from different
sides. Of course most people won't bother, but suppressing choice can only end
up sad.

~~~
joejerryronnie
_What stops Google from suppressing certain information at the request of
bureaucrats or corporations?_

Or at the request of certain well meaning but ultimately flawed and over
reaching laws?

------
tannhaeuser
TLDR:

Excuse me, but MEP Julia Reda always uses strong languages and makes a civil
liberties drama from everything (it's her job after all). AFAICT, the rights
and interest at stake are

1\. the commercial and moral rights of content creators (well not the content
creators themselves but their original publishers)

2\. the rights of providers of search engines (Google) to scrape content from
news publishers to the extent that users aren't visiting the news site, but
get everything from the SERP page already; it's a similar problem with
Wikipedia articles presented in full or large parts on Google's SERP

3\. and, unrelated but combined into the same directive, a new law that would
require platforms to make an effort to detect "copyrighted" (if there were
such a thing in EU law) content

Maybe there's also a law involved that would make linking to "illegally
provided", "copyrighted" content unlawful.

The major pros/cons discussed are

\- search engines argueing that they are executing fair use rights, and are
helping to discover content which news publishers were happy with in the past
and want them to continue to do

\- restricting fair use rights creating a case for restrictions of other fair
use such as academic or journalistic quotation

\- content scanning only feasible for large platforms, thereby only helping
defacto monopolies

\- the two issues not belonging into the same law.

Please downvote or criticize if you have an issue with this synopsis.

~~~
tannhaeuser
To be clear, I don't have an opinion on these issues yet. I respect commercial
interests of content producers. For me, making everything free for all just
because it's technically feasible/trivial isn't a solution and will just
result in pushing more power to platforms.

OTOH, I believe the material issue with news scraping could be very easily and
practically solved by

\- using RSS or other syndication format rather than full-page scraping, or
using HTML metadata to limit what search engines may display

\- using HTML metadata, deep linking/embedding or giving credit (like is done
for photo credits) for citing larger excerpts

My gut reaction to implementing user content scanning, or any other technical
details is that something like that has no place in this law. But maybe I'm
misunderstanding the intent of the law, in that it's a lesser evil compared to
making platforms liable for damages by uploaded "copyrighted" user content.

------
microcolonel
Does anyone know of a good way to comprehensively (and believably, in the eyes
of the court) block the EU from your web services? It's getting out of hand,
and I'd like to be able to avoid this cost in some cases.

~~~
aianus
[https://apility.io/2018/05/25/gdpr-lazy-block-european-
users...](https://apility.io/2018/05/25/gdpr-lazy-block-european-users-
cloudflare-workers/)

------
microcolonel
What a disaster that only the parties which are steadily alienating voters
have a stance against enabling general censorship of publishing.

------
Keverw
So if you link to a website, you are suppose to pay the website you linked to
money? That is insane... I hope this doesn't passes or I'm misunderstanding
somthing.

Links pointing to something is helpful for search engine ranking, plus every
link is free traffic basically... Linking seems like a good thing and
beneficial to the website and other parties too. I'm sure someone who's
article gets on the front page of HN would most likely to happy, but I guess
HN would have to pay every website some money then?

~~~
jsnell
Not websites in general, just press publications.

~~~
IanCal
Not that either, you need to be pulling something from the article and
republishing it.

------
clishem
This is blatant fear mongering. Furthermore, calling these directives 'link
tax laws' is simply a cheap frame. You can link to articles freely. Including
a snippet that has 'no independent economic significance' is allowed. Agreed,
that is not very precise. But is that really such a big deal?

Sure, you might get sued. That's life. You have to trust the reasonableness of
the courts. And don't worry, they won't go after you. The publishers will go
after some big fish such as Telegram (which blatantly copies entire articles
and strips it of everything but the article). Case law / Jurisprudence /
Jurisprudentie / Fallrecht will develop around this issue and everyone will be
happy.

And for some, just including a minimal snippet may not be an option. They'll
have to pay. That's also life. Journalists and publishers need to eat too.
Their work is too important to be allowed to wither.

~~~
Bizarro
_Sure, you might get sued. That 's life. You have to trust the reasonableness
of the courts. And don't worry, they won't go after you._

That line of reasoning is wrong on so many levels it's comical. And
unfortunately, we keep on seeing this on the GDPR debate too.

~~~
clishem
If you don't abide by the law, you may get sued. If you do abide by the law,
you may still get sued. There's no reasoning in there, it's a simple fact.

'My startup may get sued' is not a good argument against a law.

