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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

#171

Post by solomatov »

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.

Recent advances in DL for NLP will easily be able to help with it. Just rephrasing, nothing fancy. Though, I am not sure whether it will be considered non excerpt or whether EU will introduce new laws to work this around.

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

#172

Post by walterbell »

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

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

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

#173

Post by mikeash »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #74
mikeash wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 $…

I don’t see how that’s possible. If two regulations are in completely unrelated areas, how can they combine to destroy something?

There are plenty of cases where regulation benefits all of the involved parties. My favorite example is safety equipment for race cars. Absent regulation, there’s huge pressure to not have any because it increases weight and slows you down. But if you regulate it so everyone has to have it, you stop that dangerous incentive and everyone is better off.

And of course the classic theoretical framework for this is the prisoners’ dilemma. Forcing the prisoners to cooperate makes them both better off, but they won’t do that on their own.

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

#174

Post by anoncow »

Bizarro wrote: post #164
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…

Scumbags would want to go back to a world of slavery, colonisation and wealth locked up as gold in personal treasuries. That's some kind of weird hyperbole that doesn't make much sense. 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. The rest of the world will ignore the EU, while the EU continues to dig…

> weird hyperbole

I agree. I can't seem to understand why would someone propose something as stupid as the linktax. So my brain came up with this weird reason. Nevertheless, the world will come up with something. It always does.

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

#175

Post by IanCal »

Silhouette wrote: post #28
greglindahl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

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...

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

#176

Post by IanCal »

jsnell wrote: post #150
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.

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

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

#177

Post by reaperducer »

beagle3 wrote: post #102
reaperducer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

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

#178

Post by 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.

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

#179

Post by bitL »

walterbell wrote: post #172
pacnard wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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).

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

#180

Post by beagle3 »

reaperducer wrote: post #177
beagle3 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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