EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line • Hacker News Board

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#111

Post by DoctorOetker » Sun, May 27, 2018, 9:34 AM UTC

bluelu wrote: post #97

raverbashing wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's absurd. > Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off. Maybe that's the idea, but I think it's shooting yourself in the foot, even then.

It's even worse. Everyone who you link to has the right to claim damages(in case they are press). So you will have to be careful who you link to since a single link could already fall into the new legislation depending on the member state.

Does anyone know how this "press" is defined in the proposal?

More and more legal entities (governments, companies,...) seem to be moving to actively blurring lines so as to induce fines and damages. Suppose instead the proposal mandated any content hoster (press or not) to include a tag so that hosting software can be configured to suppress the inclusion of links to pages that contain the tag.

Without such an explicit tag, the situation will end up similar to ad blockers, with random distributed lists of sources that would probably qualify as "press"

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#112

Post by nickpp » Sun, May 27, 2018, 9:38 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #92

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 $…

> There comes a point when the compliance costs exceed the economic surplus available to cover them. If something is not worth doing right maybe it shouldn't be done at all? You are making the same point, opponents of minimum wage. "But I'll go out of business!!!" If your business is that bad, than maybe you should!

Or business will pass the compliance costs to the consumer, thus raising price for all. Those breaking the law and not complying will have a competitive advantage, as well as those large enough to spread the compliance costs over all their production. And thus the raise of the regulation-loving mega-corporation.

Wages are the price of work as established by the free market. Minimum wage in effect eliminates less competitive workers from the market place, since their added value becomes less than their cost. They are simply replaced by more productive workers or robots. The most vulnerable members of our society are affected the most, being robbed by the dignity and opportunities of a paid job and being relegated instead to live off the government's teat.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#113

Post by nickpp » Sun, May 27, 2018, 9:46 AM UTC

7952 wrote: post #96

nickpp wrote: post #11

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 w…

In an ideal world regulations would work like technological standards. By following web standards you benefit from a huge body of previous work and effort. You can deploy a website without needing to build a web browser or worry about designing a transfer protocol. You can concentrate on things that have real customer value. The same can apply to regulations. It can reduce competition in areas that damage the consume…

Regulations are compulsory - no matter if they are bad or not.

Technical standards on the other hand, are optional. People will adopt them only if the benefits will outweight their drawbacks, thus ensuring that only beneficial technical standards survive.

That little difference (optional vs compulsory) changes everything. Good ideas, when compulsory, are still a dictature, while free choice is what makes a democracy.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#114

Post by fauigerzigerk » Sun, May 27, 2018, 9:54 AM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #108

jsnell wrote: post #12

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 n…

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 land…

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.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#115

Post by tannhaeuser » Sun, May 27, 2018, 9:56 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #107

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…

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.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#116

Post by kd5bjo » Sun, May 27, 2018, 10:00 AM UTC

yummybear wrote: post #103

jsnell wrote: post #12

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 n…

I can imagine websites refusing to link and instead displays the URL so the user can enter it themselves. A lot of new companies will pop up offering their LINKTAX compliant packages that offer automatic downgrading of off-site links to user-selectable link fields, some even with custom functionality to automatically place the link in the clipboard. Tech savvy users will use adblockers to disable this auto-delinking…

It's not the link that's being taxed, but the short excerpt that's being displayed. If a website writes its own summary instead of taking a snippet directly from the article, there shouldn't be any fee.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#117

Post by kd5bjo » Sun, May 27, 2018, 10:10 AM UTC

fanzhang wrote: post #61

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…

> 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.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#118

Post by dazc » Sun, May 27, 2018, 10:11 AM UTC

kd5bjo wrote: post #116

yummybear wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine websites refusing to link and instead displays the URL so the user can enter it themselves. A lot of new companies will pop up offering their LINKTAX compliant packages that offer automatic downgrading of off-site links to user-selectable link fields, some even with custom functionality to automatically place the link in the clipboard. Tech savvy users will use adblockers to disable this auto-delinking…

It's not the link that's being taxed, but the short excerpt that's being displayed. If a website writes its own summary instead of taking a snippet directly from the article, there shouldn't be any fee.

Isn't that what the meta description is for?

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#119

Post by netheril96 » Sun, May 27, 2018, 10:15 AM UTC

speedplane wrote: post #108

jsnell wrote: post #12

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 n…

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 land…

You can just have a `robots.txt` if you don't want Google to link to your content.

Re: EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line

#120

Post by TeMPOraL » Sun, May 27, 2018, 10:16 AM UTC

nickpp wrote: post #113

7952 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an ideal world regulations would work like technological standards. By following web standards you benefit from a huge body of previous work and effort. You can deploy a website without needing to build a web browser or worry about designing a transfer protocol. You can concentrate on things that have real customer value. The same can apply to regulations. It can reduce competition in areas that damage the consume…

Regulations are compulsory - no matter if they are bad or not. Technical standards on the other hand, are optional. People will adopt them only if the benefits will outweight their drawbacks, thus ensuring that only beneficial technical standards survive. That little difference (optional vs compulsory) changes everything. Good ideas, when compulsory, are still a dictature, while free choice is what makes a democracy.

s/good ideas/ideas directly beneficial to implementer/

Technical standards are not adopted when they interfere with business goals. That's why we have no ubiquitous computing yet, that's why it took regulation to make a standard charging port for phones happen. Regulations are necessary to solve coordination problems on the market - the very problem that's defined by individual voluntary choices leading to bad outcomes for everyone.