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

juliareda.eu

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

#141

Post by lucio »

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…

>Unless they're a top 2 media conglomerate of an European country, and would like for all their weaker competitors to be killed off.

You'll be accused to be a conspiracy theorist. Is that legal in the EU still?

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

#142

Post by lucio »

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…

>are we losing more than we are gaining?

who's "we"?

some people are losing (individuals, small business, startups, entrepreneurs), and some people are gaining (bureaucrats, regulatory bodies, well-established big companies, people willing to sacrifice liberty for security)

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

#143

Post by lucio »

mikeash wrote: post #62
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…

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 r…

and who regulates the regulators?

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

#144

Post by lucio »

rnnr wrote: post #87
bitL wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine most of those involved in regulations are barely able to use Word/Excel, yet are "elected" to decide the fate of technology.

And who is going to stop them, when even multi-million companies just shallow the pill(like GDPR) and even try to market it positively that they are gonna adopt it first.

>multi-million companies just shallow the pill

They're very happy. It's not a "pill" to swallow, it's a tool to squash any small competitor.

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

#145

Post by lucio »

beagle3 wrote: post #85
anoncow wrote: post #4

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…

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.

>Other than people who actually profit of personal data, I have not met one person who isn't in favor of the GDPR

yeah!

Also, only people who have something to hide are too attached to privacy /s

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

#146

Post by carapace »

pacnard wrote: post #50
bitL wrote: post #31

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...

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

The Sixties!?

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

#147

Post by jsnell »

IanCal wrote: post #106
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 don't quite get this, the problem is not with linking, but the link previews.

It seems pretty clear that the intent is for this to cover the current linking/snippeting practices. If it wasn't covered, there is no chance of this law providing publishers a new revenue stream.

And what are those current practices? On Google News it appears to literally be just the title and maybe a tiny thumbnail image. On search it's those plus less than a sentence of text. It's pretty hard to see the intent here as not covering even just a link that uses the original title.

Links that can't even use the original title would be totally nonviable, they might as well not exist. And again, this proposal would disallow even an opt-in arrangement.

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

#148

Post by tannhaeuser »

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…

This threat has really degraded into irrational rants against ... whatever.

For a more balanced, still pro-civil rights view I'd recommend [1] (in German, with a focus on German parliamentary politics).

[1]: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/eu-staaten-sprechen-sich-fuer-u...

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

#149

Post by beevai142 »

nickpp wrote: post #131
bo1024 wrote: post #13

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.

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.

> 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.

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

#150

Post by jsnell »

Keverw wrote: post #126

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…

Not websites in general, just press publications.
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