In Germany, Google started to delist news sites from their index. After traffic dropped, the publishers gave Google a license to link freely. Law defeated.
In Spain, they went a bit further and wrote into the law that Google had to list news sites in their index. So Google News shut down in Spain. Law defeated.
I guess, third time’s the charm?
The idea is to make it impossible to give Google a free license.
The best outcome would be if Google would refuse to link to any content of European publishers.
Not so much sure that's the "best" outcome as the only possible one. As rich as Google looks, when you start dividing their income by multiple multiplicative factors it doesn't last long; the log of Google's income isn't all that large.
On the other hand, Google definitely has a lot of cash to weather what to them will be at most a partial disruption of their money making system (as this is back in the linear domain rather than the log domain), whereas the online publications that get delisted from Google will be devastated.
I would predict with some confidence that if this does pass all the way into law in the EU that it would be unlikely to last very long as law. But it can cause a lot of damage in the meantime.
The difference this time, is that contracts with individual rights owners are specifically excluded.
So the fee is likely going to be an amount that Google can afford. But for the good of the Internet, it would be best if Google refuses and shows EU citizens that copyright has gone way beyond reasonable.
Isn't that because the music creator already entered an agreement with a rights organization? If the music creator didn't enter an agreement with a rights organization, the station would have to directly enter an agreement with the musician. The musician has the power to decide whether to sign with the organization or not.
Another thing rights organizations are notorious for are overbroad claims. They invert the burden of proof and require all performances to prove they are not playing licensed songs, and all music publishers to prove they are not publishing licensed songs. There is a lot of bureaucracy involved with this inverted burden of proof, which has no legal basis except that rights organizations can afford big legal bills and those on the other side mostly cannot.
I find this whole rights organization business to be nothing but a legalized racket.
or
I wanted to link this, but "BigMedia" want me to pay, so now I'm not even mentioning their title of the topic.
It's actually more damaging than that from the perspective of EU regulators: "I can't link to that Le Monde article, so here's a WaPo piece about the same subject".
Internet content delivery spans borders, by design. All this does is disadvantage the local producers and force their customer's eyeballs offshore.
Coupled with GDPR and many websites around the world shutting down or closing their doors to European users, there won't be many places to go.
The overarching trend of artificial borders on the internet is terrifying.
GDPR is a reasonably written attempt to preserve some measure of citizen privacy (i.e. you and me). It's an extension and continuation of Data Protection that's been there 20 years. Companies coped with no ill effect.
The copyright proposal is entirely for the benefit of large media companies, and the smell of lobbyists is overpowering. (i.e. not you and me)
That’s hyperbole. Most websites provenly don’t.
The GDPR is reasonable. This is not.
No need to conflate them.
(or you can link and replace every snippet with 'censored by the EU' or something - might be a good strategy for raising awareness)
A better question is whether it's good for the user. Filter bubble, and all.
Exactly. But publishers still think they're in the 20th century
So Google has left the option that sites either give Google their content for free, and go out of business, or get delisted from search entirely, and go out of business.
https://theoutline.com/post/1399/how-google-ate-celebritynet... is a pretty good example of why this is happening.
Law is not defeated.
It means that Google, due to its market power, got the clips for free. Everyone else might be asked to pay.
It's actually anticompetitive.
I totally understand the intention behind it - you see what the death of good media and rise of clickbait/shill articles did to US and UK. The other EU governments are terrified their own information landscape might go similarly downhill - and all you have left is spam, lies, propaganda and corporate ads hidden as articles.
It's just that the approach taken here is the wrong one. They are trying to fix something but shoot at the symptoms, not the cause.
It's also true that Google is exploitative in how it uses its ad + News Power (Look at the content preloader discussion) so clearly it's not aiming at the innocent. It's just not the right tool for the job. Probably because so far no one has figured out how to fix this...
The law still applies and all that happened is that Google gets a free license and everyone who is not Google has to pay licensing fees.
I don't know the detail but the way you put it seems very fair to me. Law protect publishers against Google, so they can say to Google "no", except that their interest is to say "yes". So they say "yes". Looks to me that even if the end result is the same, the publishers had a say. Without the law, Google takes whatever it wants without asking. Now, it has to ask. Looks fair to me.
This law won't hurt Google, they have the necessary lawyers and resources to deal with the ramifications. What this will hurt are the smaller search engines that don't have the same resources as Google. This law, if enacted, will end up giving more power to Google not less. For example, with the German law, Google was given a free license [2], but was DuckDuckGo given a license? As far as I can tell no. So all that changed is that Google has a license and its competitors don't. I can't see how this is a good thing for anybody but Google. It hurts consumers, reduces market choice and will end up hurting publishers.
[0] - http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html
[1] - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608
[2] - https://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/22/german-publishers-...
Google News does not automatically take your content. You have to apply explicitely to get it included.
For regular search, there's always robots.txt. Claiming that there are any media/content producers who get included into the index against their will is absurd propaganda. Of course they want to be listed. They just want money, and Google has money, so they "convince" local politicians to make Google pay them their "share". Just like the Mafia.
No it does not, you need a lot of steps to make your website available on Google News, it does not work by default.
It's absolute madness.
Some people say that you can't solve political problems with technology but at this point it seems to me that politicians are ruining the web and there is no stopping them by political means. So it will have to be a technological solution. We need strong anonymization and strong decentralization to become the default.
The rules that are being put in place here are very dangerous to democracy. It limits the dissemination of information. You don't need to believe that there is any "evil" intent (I don't think there is, I think it's just greed on the part of businesses and lack of understanding on the part of the politicians) to see that once these limitations come into effect it becomes easier to lie to people and to control them.
We are setting ourselves up for fascist governments to be able to rise and it seems that most people don't even care :(
why do you think they're out of touch? they know exactly what they're doing: what they've been told to by the media companies
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/2...
This will just mean platforms will not link to publishers. EVER
It already failed in Spain and Germany, they will just shoot themselves in the foot again.
This puts Google in a better place than any other news aggregator.
On that argument the Spanish version of the copyright law, Google decided to shut down News for Spain completely.
So this HN post would not be illegal because of the link, but maybe because of the title that was "stolen" from the publisher. The aim is at news.google.com and other search engines and news aggregators that include a blurb coming from the article along the link. To be honest, it is not yet clear if they intend for the title to be taxed or not.
All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though.
Like this one.
Not quite. My previous comment linked to another comment. I don't believe that would be covered by this copyright proposal.
What would be covered would be a HN user posting a link to an EU publication, my reading it, and then quoting from a portion of it. The simplest fix appears to be banning linking to EU publications.
What counts as a EU publication? The author residing in the EU? Someone with a special “publisher” license? The author possessing EU citizenship? EU readership? .eu domain name? The domain registrar? The physical servers of the web hosting service? The backup service? What about those that use cloud services who have their physical infrastructure spread out wherever? And various combinations of the above…
Lastly, how would checking any of these be implemented by the software that’s supposed to be scanning for content that could possibly be in violation?
In this special case, it might not be a violation as it links to a public service broadcast site.
(IANAL)
>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 click link.
That is complete and utter nonsense. Linking itself adds value - see the uproar with Facebook getting rid of news in the feed. If the publishers genuinely felt as you do, they would simply prevent content being linked to by Google News/etc. Instead they want to demand payment for it, and force the behavior instead of letting Google choose cheaper news sources to link to.
If it's forced for all publishers, it might actually have an effect.
And it is also why I used RSS in the past but I wonder how that will be handled.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
RT is the same.
News aggregators can link to journalism sources like these without having to pay extra fees.
Of course, it might seem problematic that EU readers would get news from a Middle Eastern state-owned news source and a propaganda outlet of the Russian government, but if that's what the EU wants, it's their right to legislate that.
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.
- Google had to exclude the plaintiffs or shut down the service because they were not allowed to operate it without a license, and could not get a license in time;
- Deprived of Google traffic, the News site audience suddenly dropped and they granted Google a free license, as an emergency process to keep the lights on;
- Google keeps that free license for all sites, every other operator simply doesn’t have the capacity to reach out to every site, so competition to Google is completely killed.
The worst part of all this? There is a very old convention, well enforced, that already handles it: robots.txt
No idea how it'll work out.
If I understand correctly, which way this goes is completely at Google's discretion. And Google hasn't shown inclination to cooperate with such schemes in the past...
This is usually the case. it’s not possible for them to be experts on everything.
It's very naive to think that highly intelligent people don't know or care about what they regulate. I think it is the exact opposite. They care and understand deeply.
> Pay to send companies actual traffic? Pay to be allowed to use the basic building-block of the world wide web on the world wide web?
Amazing isn't it.
> Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation?
Think about who this benefits. You are just viewing it from one side. Who stands to benefit from all this?
These may be highly intelligent people, but what they are highly skilled at is the art of obtaining and keeping political office. That does not necessarily say anything about their knowledge of the industries they regulate, or their ability to write regulations that are free from disastrous side effects.
> Think about who this benefits. You are just viewing it from one side. Who stands to benefit from all this?
Maybe you could actually say something, instead of just hinting?
Agreed. That's my point.
> That does not necessarily say anything about their knowledge of the industries they regulate, or their ability to write regulations that are free from disastrous side effects.
They had teams of people helping them understand. Do you think these experts who work for the politicians and/or the industry don't know what the side effects are? Just because the effects would be "disastrous" for you and me doesn't mean it will be disastrous for the politicians or the people who they work for.
> Maybe you could actually say something, instead of just hinting?
I thought it was obvious. And I was trying to get you to actually think.
Do you think these guys just decided one day to make changes to the rules of the internet for fun? Why do you think they are making these changes? If you can figure it out, then let me know.
You seem to have it all figured out. Did you do any serious research on the subject that could perhaps justify your perspective? You criticize the proposal mostly because it brings change, but you do not really analyze its impact.
The lawmakers in the committee have probably spent hours studying this proposal and discussing it in detail with field experts and other affected parties. The result of their vote was far from unanimous, which means that they were not able to reach a generally acceptable consensus. To me, that indicates that the judgement about the proposal is not simple or straightforward and that quick conclusions of the "hold my beer" type should be avoided.
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 world wide web?
Just how is it possible to be so out of touch with how things work, and still be allowed to pass regulation?
I'm honestly not able to come up with an analogy which sufficiently illustrates just how backwards this whole thing is.