False. They will shoot themselves in the foot, yes. But at least in Germany, Google is the only entity which was granted a free "licence" by the collecting society.

This puts Google in a better place than any other news aggregator.

Any lawsuit in progress with regards to that?

It's not illegal, so that would require a law change. Which is what this article is about.

It sounds very much like discrimination - if no other aggregator / news site gets the same treatment.

Interesting argument. Because this is the same anti-trust argument the publishers used against Google: "Google has monopolistic power, so they should be obliged to list our content (and then, pay)".

On that argument the Spanish version of the copyright law, Google decided to shut down News for Spain completely.

Even the most well-intentioned regulations often end up benefitting the largest and most entrenched industry players. The term is "regulatory capture".

So does this mean *this HN post is illegal because it links to a news article?

No. According to the so called link-tax article, it is not linking but putting content that makes a platform liable.

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.

> it is not linking but putting content that makes a platform liable

All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though.

> All the comments quoting content would be taxable, though.

Like this one.

> 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.

I don’t usually try to deliberately ask stupid questions, but I can’t help myself in this instance.

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?

@jumpcrisscross if ernesth was from the EU though, would his comment count as an EU publication?

But without a sample of the content, the title, links are useless, see my sibling comment.

If the content you use is written by you rather than the linked site, you are not concerned by this article. So paraphrasing the article or using an automatic summarization should keep you clear.

In addition, fair use laws protect you take an excerpt and present it alongside the link. 5% or 10% of the content depending on jurisdiction.

Yes. For example meneame.net, a Spanish news aggregator, has no links to any major Spanish newspaper, because a law of this sort is in place in Spain. They would have to pay to link or quote in any way, which includes a description of the link in most cases. Basically you can't write any meaningful text in your <a href=></>.

Maybe this will improve the quality of HN submissions :P It's probably meant to make links to pirate torrents illegal though. If you have already made something publicly available eg availably for everyone for free, and you intent is to get as many readers as possible, then you can't really complain, and a sane judge would just laugh at anyone trying to sue for linking to it. What news sites used to complain about is that readers did not click on the article to go to the news site, as most of the article could be read on Google, with images and all.

Not because it links, but because it uses the headline (which is copyright protected) as the link text.

In this special case, it might not be a violation as it links to a public service broadcast site.

(IANAL)

I wrote a Romanian news concentrator as a hobby project, guess I will have to put it down now. They were 99% bullshit anyway - clickbait and fake news. That's what they are protecting.

Why not just use URL shortener outside of EU?

If I use the article title and main image thumbnail I might still be under legal restrictions.

Would you fund the lawsuits they'll get?

If the link shortener is operated by an entity outside the EU is it still subject to EU law?

You'll get the lawsuit, not the link shortener.

In Spain they _had to_ link to publishers, so Google has shut down their service.

No, the problem was that publishers were not permitted to grant free licenses.