Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#2What a joke, this is all getting absolutely out of hand. It genuinely worries me not that the internet gets totally locked down, just that something I love is being proved lawless by the very people who are complaining about lawbreaking. Copyright stake holders are making the web a worse place at all spectrums of "infringement".
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#3There's a lot of greed in copyright, and there's a lot of stupidity, but this is an example of both combined in one place. What kind of colossal misunderstanding does it take to confuse linking and copying?
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#4Er - so there is a fair use defence for using short quotations from articles, but linking to the source so that the reader can see the whole context of the quote may be a copyright infringement? Sounds really sensible to me.
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#5Er - so there is a fair use defence for using short quotations from articles, but linking to the source so that the reader can see the whole context of the quote may be a copyright infringement? Sounds really sensible to me.
Fair use doesn't exist in EU. There are certain provisions of copying allowed for research and a few select reasons but its much more restrictive than the US.
So if they had used quotes from the article they could genuinely be in trouble.
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#6The NLA in the UK is doing exactly the same thing.
I can't believe the stupidity of this. Basically Newspapers are giving these 'companies' the right to extort money from anyone who links to their news website.
The high court has assured that individuals do not count and scraping from free services like Google Alerts is ok.
However if you do it in work for a company bigger than 7 people you can be a legitimate target for litigation.
Well the loss of links is going to slap them down the rankings for news stories and their websites overall as anyone with links to their site will have to remove them. Shooting in foot with a shotgun comes to mind.
There is also a case under litigation in the UK and is still unresolved..
If you work for a newspaper make sure your editor understands that the end effect if this jokery continues is that your newspaper website (that you're spending a lot of money on) will plummet in the search engines as people rush in droves to remove links.
Link to the UK NLA debacle. http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7826-nla-v-meltwater-are-mil...
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#7Er - so there is a fair use defence for using short quotations from articles, but linking to the source so that the reader can see the whole context of the quote may be a copyright infringement? Sounds really sensible to me.
Fair use doesn't exist in EU. There are certain provisions of copying allowed for research and a few select reasons but its much more restrictive than the US. So if they had used quotes from the article they could genuinely be in trouble.
> Fair use doesn't exist in EU.
This matter is country-level, internal to Ireland. In Ireland, they have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing See, for example, notes here http://www.poetryireland.ie/resources/copyright.html under ``Reproducing copyrighted material'', which mentions a citation of 5% of magazine article falls under Fair Dealing protection.
I don't know whether there's EU-wide fair use, but there seems to be in member countries. For example, in my home Poland, we have http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dozwolony_użytek
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#8Linking is an inherent part of the web, and publishing on the web means having links to your content. This is like asking somebody to pay for mentioning the name of your book in a reading list.
A few years ago, there was a similar case in Germany. IIRC, it got rejected by the judge for being totally stupid.
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#9A reply has been sent to Women's Aid from Newspaper Licensing Ltd: http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2012/05/24/reply-received-fro...
I recommend following @Tupp_Ed (Simon McGarr) on twitter as he's very involved in copyright issues in Ireland. He previously came to fame when the Irish Minister of State for Research and Innovation refused to participate in a debate on the Irish equivalent to SOPA unless Simon stepped down from the panel.
Re: Charity asked to pay just to link to newspaper websites
#10I didn't think it was possible to sue or charge someone for linking to a specific website. It would be like banning someone from saying where they heard about a story. "I read about it in the Times, page 25."
It doesn't make sense at all. The SEO guy for the paper will probably hold their head in their hands when they discover the site they are trying to promote is taking legal action against anyone who links to it.