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European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

bbc.com

161–170 of 407 posts

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#161

This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate. So I guess this is bad. --goes and reads article-- > Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved. What the fucking FUCK? Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the wor…

On the one hand I can see how stupid these laws are in view of how the Web currently works and how successful it is. On the other hand, I think companies like Google and Facebook are FAR too large and powerful and I think the only way to deal with that is by making the Web less good at what it does.

See also: What does it mean cut off your nose to spite your face?

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Showing the snippet makes people more likely to click through, not less. If you aren't a copyright maximalist, how is that not good for both aggregator and news site? A better question is whether it's good for the user. Filter bubble, and all.

This isn't true if you realize what sort of "snippets" they are trying to deal with. Google has been scraping content for Knowledge Graph, and offering up "the answers" so that users don't click through any links. So Google rips off other companies' content, and has basically said "if you don't like it, feel free to block Google with robots.txt and get delisted from search". So Google has left the option that sites e…

I've literally never seen one of those knowledge-graph snippets relating to current news? Google News now has stopped showing teaser texts for news for some publishers after a similar German law was passed, but "surprisingly" the majority of publishers preferred to allow Google to show teasers... (Which is why there's now talk of forbidding publishers to grant that permission for free)

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#163

This is what happens when those in control don't understand, know or care about the things they regulate. So I guess this is bad. --goes and reads article-- > Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved. What the fucking FUCK? Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the wor…

>> Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved. >What the fucking FUCK? This does not surprise me! If your site has for example 5 article titles from CNN, linking all of them to original CNN articles, probably you have more benefit from that than CNN. People this days like to skim through titles and not even bothering to read full articles, to c…

That's one of the reasons I frequent this site, so I don't have to wade through dozen bad homepages laden with adds to find interesting articles.

And it is also why I used RSS in the past but I wonder how that will be handled.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#165
post #107

As a EU citizen I have always been (and still am) a strong advocate for the European Union. I think the founding of the European Union was one of the greatest things that could ever happen to European citizens. I full heartedly believe this institution played a major role in retaining the piece after World War 2. The concept of open borders in (most of) Europe is something I would never want to miss. But seeing the l…

You're right. It does indeed make it harder. Why add an unpleasant general assertion ('most') about EU critics? Can you say what proportion of the 17.5 million EU critics who voted for their country to leave the EU, are 'straight up racists'? And how are you so sure?

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that Article 11 will backfire. What if Google decides to remove all publishers from search results to avoid having to pay a fee? Their traffic will tank.

If Google doesn't link to anything anymore, its own traffic may hurt a bit as well.

There's plenty of non-EU news to link to.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#167

Honestly, I think it might be better if these old news companies die off, and clear space for a newer generation that understands the internet better. We have 20 years years of anecdata now. The old news publishers will never make it online. They see their financials problems as being cause by a moral failing in society: " People do not value quality, and won't pay for it " or somesuch. They see the solutions as lega…

The "old news publishers" employ actual journalists. They should not be allowed to die off.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#168
What I haven't heard mentioned yet is, that for the big companies like Google and Facebook, there won't actually be much change in regards to upload filters, because they already do this. The DMCA has led to quite a similar problem for them, so that for example youtube provides big license holders with backend to decide themselves which videos to block for reasons of copyright infringement. So in the end, they wont even have to do anything, they already have the infrastructure in place to overblock and have indeed done so for many years.

But at the same time, where this becomes really disastrous is smaller communities, where admins and moderators have no chance of checking every post themselves for violations and neither the technological means to do it automatically.

In Germany at least, this was from time to time reason for lawsuits but until now, the consensus of the courts was, that it is enough for the admin to remove the offending content after he was made aware of it. This changes now of course, which makes it practically impossible to offer these kind of services if you are not a big company with huge resources. I know Forums and the like are not as far spread as they once were, but this will make it practically impossible to create these kind of communities.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google doesn't link to anything anymore, its own traffic may hurt a bit as well.

There's plenty of non-EU news to link to.

Sure, but most of it isn't particularly interesting for EU readers. The vast majority isn't even in their own language.

Re: European parliament committee approves vote on ‘disastrous’ copyright bill

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of non-EU news to link to.

Sure, but most of it isn't particularly interesting for EU readers. The vast majority isn't even in their own language.

Only temporarily. A lot of publishers would be happy to increase their current market share to cover EU content. At least for English, French and Spanish, I could easily see some foreign media boosting their traffic.
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