European Parliament proposal for Link Tax: Would this damage LTT in Europe?

[WMGroomAK]

Techspot has an article on some news coming out of the EFF concerning a new proposal within the European Parliament to impose a Link Tax as a part of the update to the European Copyright Directive.  Basically as it is worded, websites and news publishers would be required to pay a copyright-fee to the original source of a news article or to include even small snippets of those articles in their own stories.  Seeing as how a lot of the news articles on the LTT forum require a source article and quotation of text, I could see that this would create a lot of additional burden as well as the way news stories are multiply linked and sourced online, this will just be a headache to follow and implement...

 

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/european-copyright-law-isnt-great-it-could-soon-get-lot-worse

Quote

The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the "link tax" proposal, which would establish a special copyright-like fee to be paid by websites to news publishers, in exchange for the privilege of using short snippets of quoted text as part of a link to the original news article. Voss's latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to.

 

The practical effect of this could be to make it impossible for a news publisher to publish their stories for free use, for example by using a Creative Commons license. When a similar inalienable link tax was passed into law in Spain, the country's biggest news aggregation website, which had been Google News, simply closed its Spanish operation. We can well imagine similar results if the link tax went Europe-wide

 

That's not all. Voss proposes that the beneficiaries of the link tax should include press agencies (who often provide the raw information based upon which other journalists write stories), and that libraries should also be responsible for paying extra fees to publishers in "compensation" for their rental and lending activities.

 

Although Voss hasn't managed to make the upload filtering proposal any worse than it was before, it was plenty bad enough already. Although targeted mainly at sites that host video and music uploaded by users, it's broad enough to extend to extend to any sort of user-uploaded content, including code contributed to platforms like Github, and even text contributed to a user-edited encyclopedia (although Voss would support an amendment excluding non-profit encyclopedias from the law, which may or may not save Wikipedia).

While I don't live in Europe, I could see this having a massive impact on news & information sharing, especially in ensuring that news is shared to the rest of the outside from Europe...  Seems more like an information control ploy than something that is actually useful.  

 

https://www.techspot.com/news/74113-european-copyright-directive-impose-link-tax-subsidize-publishers.html

[Skiiwee29]

I dont think this would hurt LTT. Its not LTT doing it, and LTT is not based on Europe. Usually things like this require the offending party to be based within the jurisdiction that is covered by these laws. LTT is based in Canada so this wouldnt/shouldnt apply to them in a legal basis. 

[Ezzy-525]

If Google managed to avoid it by simply closing down operations in Spain, it would seem LTT would be fine unless this was somehow enforced by the Canadian Govt.

[WMGroomAK]

2 minutes ago, legacy99 said:

I dont think this would hurt LTT. Its not LTT doing it, and LTT is not based on Europe. Usually things like this require the offending party to be based within the jurisdiction that is covered by these laws. LTT is based in Canada so this wouldnt/shouldnt apply to them in a legal basis. 

 

2 minutes ago, Ezzy-525 said:

If Google managed to avoid it by simply closing down operations in Spain, it would seem LTT would be fine unless this was somehow enforced by the Canadian Govt.

I would hope that having your business/operation based in a separate jurisdiction would provide some semblance of security, however both Google and Wikipedia are home based in countries outside of the EU and it appears that, in Spain at least, Google's answer was to shut down news operations.  It feels like there might be a large legal grey area and that if this were to pass, LTT might have to exclude EU based news sources or potentially face a tax on those sources...

[Tieox]

Doesn't the flipping EU do something like this every sodding year, afaik they tried to copyright all images on Google Images a while back... seems a yearly "thing" they must do, how to fuck something up for zero bloody reason.

[Canada EH]

This has nothing to do with USA or Canada period

[Taf the Ghost]

2 minutes ago, Kierax said:

Doesn't the flipping EU do something like this every sodding year, afaik they tried to copyright all images on Google Images a while back... seems a yearly "thing" they must do, how to fuck something up for zero bloody reason.

No, that's the reason. They need to be seen as being useful, rather than the draconian future they represent.

 

@WMGroomAK

 

Forgive me, but...

 

 

[WMGroomAK]

5 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

This has nothing to do with USA or Canada period

It has nothing to do with current US or Canadian issues, however it does impact the ability to share information on the internet, which would affect the ability to get information within the US or Canada.  I also worry that if it passes, it may inspire the US and Canadian politicians to give it a try themselves...  

[Sakkura]

16 minutes ago, Kierax said:

Doesn't the flipping EU do something like this every sodding year, afaik they tried to copyright all images on Google Images a while back... seems a yearly "thing" they must do, how to fuck something up for zero bloody reason.

These are proposals, not things that have actually been done. The EU parliament has allll kinds of different parties in it, so you get all kinds of proposals - including some very silly stuff.

 

Most of the silly stuff gets weeded out and never actually passed.

 

It's kinda like how Indiana once almost ended up legally defining Pi as being equal to 3.2.

[Snapperx]

13 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

These are proposals, not things that have actually been done. The EU parliament has allll kinds of different parties in it, so you get all kinds of proposals - including some very silly stuff.

 

Most of the silly stuff gets weeded out and never actually passed.

 

It's kinda like how Indiana once almost ended up legally defining Pi as being equal to 3.2.

He is just salty because of the Brexit.

[Guest The Viking]

35 minutes ago, Kierax said:

Doesn't the flipping EU do something like this every sodding year, afaik they tried to copyright all images on Google Images a while back... seems a yearly "thing" they must do, how to fuck something up for zero bloody reason.

 

31 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

No, that's the reason. They need to be seen as being useful, rather than the draconian future they represent.

 

@WMGroomAK

 

Forgive me, but...

 

-pic-

 

11 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

These are proposals, not things that have actually been done. The EU parliament has allll kinds of different parties in it, so you get all kinds of proposals - including some very silly stuff.

 

Most of the silly stuff gets weeded out and never actually passed.

 

It's kinda like how Indiana once almost ended up legally defining Pi as being equal to 3.2.

as mentioned by Sakkura, these are proposals. There are tons of these, taking in account the amount of variety of parties there are in the EP (8 different parties going from conservative to greens)

 

They do a lot of useful things, except people don't bother looking into them, or you aren't told about it.

 

Most recent public achievements: roaming? Gone, thanks to who? not telecoms, no. Being able to watch/stream your content all over Europe without limitations? oh, gone too, thanks to EP. Not being abused by ISPs and have some kind of net neutrality? EP too.

[Guest The Viking]

Yes, I remember when Google had to shut down their news thing in Spain.

 

It was rather... well newspapers were divided, some were unhappy to provide google news for free and wanted a kickback, others actually said they benefited from this.

 

Though even if google news shut down in spain, you can still use the function, they just recommend news now and that's where they stop, a bit of a grey area.

 

To me this proposal from EP is just a sad move from the currently dying media that is having a hard time adapting to modern times. Gone the days were you had to pay to read them, now you can access their sites for free=less income for them. Media has always been struggling regardless.

 

It just won't get anywhere and will end up forgotten. 

 

But no, I doubt LTT would be affected, as we are the ones providing and discussing the news, on a forum. At the end of the day we could just summarize the article in 2 sentences and done.

[Ryujin2003]

52 minutes ago, legacy99 said:

I dont think this would hurt LTT. Its not LTT doing it, and LTT is not based on Europe. Usually things like this require the offending party to be based within the jurisdiction that is covered by these laws. LTT is based in Canada so this wouldnt/shouldnt apply to them in a legal basis. 

While I agree, I think I might have my understanding of the law wrong. But it sounds like it's designed for sites that republish stories from other sites or cite from those stores to build their own. For LTT, Gamers Nexus, and users, they are retelling the information provided, but aren't claiming the story as their in, so I don't think this is their intended Target.

 

 

 

 

//Break...

 

On a tangent, this is what happens when media become funded by advertisements. It looks like the issue is people reading information from a source in a separate site, and are losing out on as revenue... This had really gotten out of hand.

 

Maybe the ad revenue model needs to change, not the law...

[xriqn]

The EU are stupid af, I'm glad the UK is going ahead with Brexit. So long as other non EU countries agree trade deals with us (such as america, canada, china, etc) we're fine. But even some of the countries still in the EU might want to trade with us.

[LAwLz]

To me, this actually makes sense.

Not sure if I will be happy with how it will end up being implemented (lots of room to screw it up), but there are a lot of big websites that mostly just repost articles from proper websites, and it is very harmful to the industry.

 

Imagine hiring reports to write well formulated articles, and then some website just rewords what you wrote and push it to their readers. There are lots of massive websites which only base their content on other publications' work, and if that keeps going on then the industry will collapse for everyone. The real sources will have to make cuts because they don't make enough money, and the websites reposting content will suffer too.

[TheUzu]

The original news source now a days is Twitter, well at least for the mainstream trashy media so it looks like Twitter will turn some record profits....

[vanished]

This sounds really stupid.  Not only would they never be able to track down everyone doing this, but it's just going to discourage the use of multiple sources, and the reporting of sources, both of which are things you should be trying to encourage.

[Doobeedoo]

Nah I don't see this passing though. 

[AlTech]

16 hours ago, LAwLz said:

To me, this actually makes sense.

Not sure if I will be happy with how it will end up being implemented (lots of room to screw it up), but there are a lot of big websites that mostly just repost articles from proper websites, and it is very harmful to the industry.

 

Imagine hiring reports to write well formulated articles, and then some website just rewords what you wrote and push it to their readers. There are lots of massive websites which only base their content on other publications' work, and if that keeps going on then the industry will collapse for everyone. The real sources will have to make cuts because they don't make enough money, and the websites reposting content will suffer too.

This tax would practically kill LTT TNR section for Europeans users.

[Syntaxvgm]

Eu lawmakers these days