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The European Commission Is Preparing a Frontal Attack On the Hyperlink (juliareda.eu)
An anonymous reader writes: Julia Reda, a member of the European parliament, is sounding the alarm on new copyright legislation under development. She says the European Commission is considering copyright protection for hyperlinking. Reda says, "This idea flies in the face of both existing interpretation and spirit of the law as well as common sense. Each weblink would become a legal landmine and would allow press publishers to hold every single actor on the Internet liable." Under this scheme, simply linking to copyrighted material would be legally considered "providing access," and thus require explicit permission of the rightsholder. Reda warns that it could lead to legal expenses for anyone who shares links (read: everybody), and ultimately the fragmentation of the internet.
Nothing on the internet is good anymore. It is a corporate wasteland.
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
When you create a super-layer of petty bureaucrats to run your lives, you can't be overly surprised when they create a bunch of petty and stupid rules.
As usual, the people in charge of the law have no idea how technology works.
To make a car analogy... well, this thing is so mind-bogglingly stupid that I can't think of any analogy.
Fight for your bitcoins!
Glad to know that the EU is run by lobbyists too.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://www.nextbigwhat.com/did... Some govt agencies in India adopted this practice way back in 2011
I'd read TFA, but I didn't want to do anything illegal by clicking the link.
I cannot use your services anymore. Hosting anything on your machines has become a liability and we have to discontinue doing business with you. Fortunately, on the internet it matters jack shit where I put my files, so as long as you have insane politicians, this will be NOT YOU.
If you don't enjoy losing business, get some politicians that think before they act.
Signed,
Former customer
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
::Hyperlink deleted due to violation of EU link sharing regulation::
Tell my again why we need to worship European government and solutions?
Living in the UK I experience a constant trickle of Euromyth nonsense, straight bananas, covering up barmaids breasts, bombay mix, the eurosausage etc etc etc. So maybe this will become a real thing and the eurosceptics will have successfully cried wolf enough time for people to not notice the tiger in the living room. But I doubt it.
Of all of the things on a very long list in Europe and beyond, have these politicians really nothing better to do than this? I can't help but refer back to an old friend of mine who wisely said, "if it doesn't make sense, the answer is money".
Dear Poster who commented on the term "actor" being deliberately used as a euphemism to desensitize people to the harsh realities of war, baby killers, and hospital bombers:
Still think that's why people use the word?
The analogy is roads. Imagine micromanaging all road traffic because someone, somewhere, will use the roads for criminal activity.
Europeans and *much* too progressively intelligent to pull a stunt this stupid. (At least that's what Europeans keep saying about themselves when America does something stupid.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I don't mind the creation of walled gardens up to a point. The death of AOL taught us that people will migrate to free networks when they're available. What I'm worried about is that a walled garden will be created that has the infrastructure for total coercive control over speech but generally does not exercise it. In practical terms this will almost be free speech and will be used at first to control only the least popular (legal) speech. Piracy, rape porn, Doxxing. People will say "nothing of value was lost". Until the grip tightens and "doxxing" turns into "publishing the real-world associations of a journalist". And "Rape porn" turns into "porn without obvious enthusiastic consent". And "Piracy" turns into "violation of draconian copyright laws". Soon enough there will be a huge struggle to convince people of the danger. Free speech advocates will be labeled conspiracy loons. And we'll have to create new mesh networks just to permit vibrant debate. Oh wait...
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
This is a bs story.
Similar to the everybody must pay jpeg tax paranoia 15 years ago
Anyone who has half a brain can instantly tell that this is simply spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Of course EU would never pass such a law, it would be stark raving mad.
Real question is, what kind of a state is Slashdot in, to participate in spreading this s***?
I make a legal and permitted link to some content. Then, the content at that URI is changed to something I am no longer legally allowed to link to. Am I committing a crime? I don't control what a URI points to. The owner of the server does.
Sometimes they make a lot of sense, and sometimes they dont
I view a hyperlink as a form of citation. If European periodical publishers don't want their articles to be cited in other works, let them live with a decrease in their impact factor.
if you are think you will not be sued, that your assets will not be seized and that you will not be convicted, just because you host your website on servers not in the EU, think again.
Signed,
EU
so it can be reborn.
A series of fragmented "Internets" would allow the market to drive the right kind of decisions.
I'm not sure the old BBS days were so bad.
We need a robots.txt like file in the root which grants linking permission. Then in firefox have an option which flags unlinkable destination, and by default block such sites. Have the option in the first run dialog. Then actively campaign against sites whose copyright is not in the spirit of the open web, gpl style. Have an open web general license which permits only open web general sites to link to it. Word the license carefully. That is my thought.
John_Chalisque
The law should treat hyperlinks as being equivalent to bibliographical references and citations in printed works. After all, that is all a hyperlink is. That browsers automate the retrieval and display of the referenced work, rather than having to search the stacks or ask the librarian to fetch the book/journal, should not affect the status of the hyperlink. As for banning them, I personally think that most web pages do not take enough advantage of hyperlinks within the body of the pages.
See http://john.chalisque.net/Link...
John_Chalisque
The World Wide Web has existed for about 25 years - quarter of a century. When it was first created, Tim Berners-Lee and his collaborators made a careful and considered decision to give the specifications away free (as in speech and as in beer). Not only was that the right thing, the ethical thing to do; it was in the spirit of the (then infant) FOSS movement; and last but not least, it was the best way to give the new-born Web wings and enable it to spread rapidly until it became truly worldwide.
Today the Web has, at the very least, 47 billion pages (based on Google statistics). How many links do you think the average page has? This proposed legislation would destroy all possible confidence in using any one of those links. It would be the Internet equivalent of magically removing the foundations of every building in New York City. The effect on the Web would be similar to the effect of 9/11 on the World Trade Center - except that it would affect over a billion people and virtually every business and government in the world.
If anyone does not wish to have people view his Web pages through links from other pages, he has a simple remedy: DON'T PUT UP A WEB SITE. If you do choose to gain the benefits of putting up a Web site, then DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE WAY IT WORKS.
Here is TBL's considered view of the status of links, posted in 1997:
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues...
TBL wrote: "The ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech to the same extent that speech is free. Making the reference with a hypertext link is more efficient but changes nothing else... Users and information providers and lawyers have to share this convention. If they do not, people will be frightened to make links for fear of legal implications. I received a mail message asking for "permission" to link to our site. I refused as I insisted that permission was not needed".
And here is his conclusion:
"There are some fundamental principles about links on which the Web is based. These are principles allow the world of distributed hypertext to work. Lawyers, users and technology and content providers must all agree to respect these principles which have been outlined.
"It is difficult to emphasize how important these issues are for society. The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for example, addresses the right to speak. The right to make reference to something is inherent in that right. On the web, to make reference without making a link is possible but ineffective - like speaking but with a paper bag over your head".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The only logical conclusion one can come to is this:
It's time to abolish the European Union. It has done untold harm, and very little good (if any). When a government body proposes such sheer, raving insanity, it is signing its own suicide note.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Next up, libraries held liable for catalogues of their book holdings, which "provide access" to the place on the shelf where copyrighted works can be found.
I see from Julia Reda's article that she believes the main pressure for this cretinous measure is coming from publishers. They think, she says, that their income from advertising is shrinking too quickly.
It is immediately obvious that publishers, as a group, would be perfectly delighted if the Web were to vanish tomorrow. They are under continuous severe pressure from Amazon and Google - Amazon sells their books at far lower prices than they would wish, and has established something close to a monopsony where it is the only wholesale purchaser and therefore can set its own terms. Meanwhile, Google Books is exposing vast amounts of what publishers consider their property (they don't have a high opinion of writers) to public scrutiny, without charge. Worst of all, a whole generation has grown up in the earnest belief that books and magazines, as such, are unnecessary; everything worth knowing can (they think) be found, free of charge, on the Web. Of course this isn't true, or even nearly true, but - as they say in business circles - "perception is all".
The publishing industry is certainly going through hard times, and facing very difficult decisions. But taking the Web down with it is certainly not the answer. Everyone who is in a position to do so should let the EU know, in no uncertain terms, how frightful a proposal this is and just what its consequences would be, if implemented.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
They're not under EU jurisdiction, you aren't directly linking to another site.
The content industry has this enormous misconception about how the Internet works. They think it's like a street you drive down, the websites are like stores you pass by, and if you see an interesting store you stop by to visit. They opposed Google News aggregating snippets from news sites because they felt it was like Google was putting a big Google sign in front of their store.
That's not how the Internet works. There is no independent road. The hyperlinks are the road. That is, you do not travel down a road passing by stores. You travel from store to store via hyperlinks. That entire network of hyperlinks connecting the stores is the Internet.
If this law passes, the content industry thinks they can assert copyright over a hyperlink to their site, and the linking site will have to pay them a small copyright fee. In reality what will happen is the linking site will simply delete the hyperlink. The end result will be what happened when they tried to prevent Google News from linking their articles, times a million. Any site exercising copyright control over hyperlinks will be cutting themselves off from the Internet. First their Google Pagerank will plummet since it's based partly on how many other sites link to your site, and they'll disappear from the search engines. Eventually there will no longer be any way to navigate from the Internet at large to those sites, because all the hyperlinks to them have been deleted per their request. Exercising copyright over hyperlinks will be electronic suicide, and the only remaining sites will be ones which include a legal waiver that it is completely legal to link to their site.
Please please please let this law pass!
And other closed gardens.
Then again, that might not be a bad idea for some things.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
It's called the law of the World Wide Web, and it comes down to us from the writings of the global prophet Tim.
The actual wording of the law is too technical for mere mortals, being as it is written in ancient C code found on an artifact we think was called a hard drive dug up from the buried ruins of a cyclotron in what was once Switzerland.
But the law can be paraphrased as:
If you deposit your writings or your pictures on an HTTP or HTTPS server without access control
- and thus allow your work to be served,
(that is freely transferred by the standard world wide web protocols)
to any of the computers attached to the great public Internet,
- then you implicitly have created a holy URL by which your work can be accessed and copied,
- and should you also allow the URL itself to be discovered over the Internet by the use of standard world wide web protocols,
- THEN it is the law that:
- any person or machine is allowed
(as inherently enabled and implied by the fundamental nature of the technology as Tim intended it)
- to republish that URL on any writings that they also cause to be served by the same standard protocols.
- and to copy and read or view the writings or pictures that you made freely available by your action of publishing it on the World Wide Web.
Thus is created the fundamental Web network nature of creation that we know as the World Wide Web.
This is the first law of the Holy Interwebs. Bookmark it and do not lose it.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I, for one, post my links in the form of unique, bad poems, for which I hold the natural copyright. An example: Slash that dot for the com is near, discussion front is always dear; There is not right, there is no wrong, so forward with the http://
Government run amok again. Control and tax everything.
I was going to post exactly this, anyone who enforces this will simply vanish from the Internet. In fact EU content providers should be fighting this as even the existence of such a law could diminish external linking.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
And in this case, the people involved willingly walked into it, basically, demanded that this sort of control be ceded to the faceless unelected bureaucrats. No one to blame but themselves.
No, that's not what will happen. The Internet will turn into cable TV where you pay outrageous rates for a few popular sites and get a bunch of others thrown in too, just enough to keep the average person from complaining or switching. Media companies will love this. Retailers will love this. Everyone will love it except customers. If Walmart is able to out bid Amazon on a specific Internet provider, then everyone forced to use that provider by their physical location will also be forced to make almost all online purchases from Walmart. The bigger companies will be able to buy monopolies with no chance of someone else toppling them.
During the transition to that, Google will be forced to pay. Everyone will stop using Google if it stops bringing them to the sites they want. If many of the popular sites cut deals with Microsoft and you'd only find them on Bing, then the average person will switch to Bing. As Google basically only has one product, ads, the company will be destroyed. So Google will have to pay to keep itself alive.
Please please please eject anyone supporting this from the government.
AOL, Compuserver, etc... are all dead or dying. Please lets not repeat that section of history.
The amount of bullshit that comes from Brussels is just astronomical. It's amazing how a 'government' can
act so completely beside facts and reality. The EU is already a walking dead.
I feel I have to repeat myself:
The commission is appointed by the democratic member states, a bit like how in many countries the government is appointed by the elected parliament.
See, outside of the UK you don't need to be a member of parliament to get a seat in the government, get used to it, it works fine.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Actually I think the effect of an ill-conceived law like this would be even worse: Since it's links, then all search engines wouldn't be allowed to list their sites; they would essentially disappear from the Internet almost immediately. You'd already have to know about the site in question, and be able to type it in from the keyboard from memory, as it sounds like even emailing a link to someone would be considered a violation. The effect would be almost comical, if it wasn't so sad: You'd have thousands, maybe millions of sites, suddenly panicking because their daily hits immediately go to almost zero.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Any time you make an official's position further from an election (e.g. An election --> parliamentary body --> committee --> appointee) you increase likelihood of corruption with *every* additional step.
Want to fuck the world up? Let politician puppets of corporations run things. See today's world as proof. As you can see they're not done fucking it up even moreso yet. I rest my case.
robots.txt?
I work in the content industry for a major news provider. We understand how the internet works very, very well. Most of the experts work for us, never forget that.
What people like you don't understand is that the content industry would be quite happy to see the internet implode. Our CEOs remember when they made big, big money selling copy (look up the Hearst estate some time). Our editors remember when they were king makers; they used to be called the fourth branch of government. The internet ended that.
My company is an online leader, we haven't made a profit in a decade. Before the internet we were a regional paper, and made a healthy profit every year. If something came along that had a massive chilling effect on the internet, well I'd lose my job but I bet all the other departments in the company would be quite happy about it.
I was tempted to cite something interesting, but I realised I didn't have enough money to pay a lawyer to see whether it was legal to do so or whether I could get a license to do so.
In reality I would appreciate a list of the bill's sponsors and then just blacklist them, so we don't accidentally make their content linkable.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The person who puts the <a></a> tags around it? Or the person who chooses to interpret (or chooses to use an interpreter that interprets) those tags as a hyperlink?
The ones that are poisoning the internet with all the botnets and viruses. You have revealed yourselves! Wouldn't surprise me one bit. Follow the money.
To make something like this happening you need to rewrite all the existing copyright law, Bern Convention etc.
So: this is never going to happen.
Anyone who had a clue knew: either the story is completely made up or the initiative is doomed to fail because it comes from a wacko.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So does that mean that google news doesn't honour robots.txt?
.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Seriously I am warning you. Under no circumstances are you allowed to click my reply link.
They could list it couldn't they? Wouldn't they just have to make the URL plaintext, not wrapped in an anchor tag (and presumable place instructions to copy and paste the URL into your browser's address bar)?
And websites were bitching about lost revenue from Ad Blockers?
ROFL
So... instead of having active URLs, sites will have copy-it-yourself-to-your-address-bar URLs. A bit stoneage, but then that's where the guys with such ideas come from. One would then install a browser extension to automate that copy/paste. The URLs would become blue and clickable, something akin to hyperlinks, but not called that. Citation references activated by browser extension? :)
And yet magnet links would probably not be covered, because they're not hyperlinks to anything, but are a small bunch of data that can be used to get a torrent file, which, in turn, doesn't hyperlink to the tracker and chunks.
I'm sure whoever proposed this was thinking of sites that point to pirated content hosted on other sites, but fucked it all up. They want to go after all those Pirate Bay proxies that tunnel to the blocked Pirate Bay, which, in turn, provides magnet links (which could easily be non-hyper text), which are used then by your favourite torrent client to pull down a torrent file, which then tells the client how to get the pirated content down; and after all those sites where you can watch films online without torrenting (thus they can't get your on the "seed" technicality) which redirect you to video hosting sites which aren't pirate sites per-se but host the stupid film that you want to watch at the price of a thousand malware popunders. Because books have been using "hypolinks" in their bibliographies and footnotes since forever, and nobody sane would ban those.
Nonsense. Australia appoints its public law enforcement officials - police chiefs, judges, public prosecutors & defenders, etc - and it works with minimal levels of corruption.
Election of such officials - WITHOUT mandatory voting - just results in interest groups getting their preferred puppet installed, and sets up conditions that encourage corruption. When your continued employment depends on popularity instead of merit, you find ways legal and otherwise to maintain your popularity.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
The experts work for you? Are you sure? Media web sites are the crappiest of them all: Slow, fragile, lots of cruft. Oh right, that's on purpose, so that the internet will implode... It doesn't work that way. Without the links, your sites will implode. The internet, even the web in particular, will be fine. The actual experts will make a simple technical standard by which a page author can allow linking from non-commercial and/or commercial web sites, and other options. This is of course a trap, because your bosses will think they have a choice and make stupid limitations on links. And this is why the commercial net is about to become completely beholden to search engines and other "gatekeepers", who will simply demand blanket permission to link, and get it. Nobody else will accept the risk though, so that's going to be it: Your worst enemies, Google and Facebook, will make you their bitch. Practice this: "Yes, Mr. Zuckerberg, at your service, Mr. Zuckerberg, right away, Mr. Zuckerberg."
n/t
If you dont want the internet to work as intended stay off.
We dont need you here.
You can take you web site private.
That is like me getting a car and saying I dont like left turns outlaw them.
As some Dick actually saying OK.
Apparently the EU has access to way better mind-altering drugs than we here in the USA do..
PPN
People who put their work up on the Internet for the world to see don't like people linking to their work for all the world to see?
Makes perfect sense, got it.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Stop providing links to torrents for copyrighted material.
Stop defending piracy!!!
So if you would need explicit permission to post links would this link be a copyright violation since Slashdot hasn't given me permission? And would Slashdot be inducing infringement by allowing me to infringe on their copyright (without giving me explicit permission)?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This is like when Goodyear tried to patent the use of boiled rubber. Everybody "accidentally" boiled it in their industries for made everything. In the end the patent was impossible to apply.
There may even have been a religious angle
Something about "squaring the circle" and an argument between Christians and ancient Greeks, it's been around for centuries. Oddly general relativity dictates a circle drawn around a deep gravity well will significantly reduce the value of Pi, the value for Earth's gravity well makes the circumference of a circular orbit around it about an inch less than expected using Pi.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I can get a host from the US, in which case my privacy will be "respected" by the Three Letter Agencies. Or I can get a host from the EU, where they are seriously considering a notion that died in the mid-90's, with extreme prejudice and cause, due to the Web.
Australia perhaps? No, Five Eyes member. Oh I know, China, or possibly Russia or Malaysia. Places where rights are respected and freedom is given it's due!
Anon, you're making a common, but understandable mistake: you're injecting common sense and logic into a conversation concerning business people and politicians, who habitually don't make a lick of sense at all. They'd probably have the National Guard raid Google's headquarters for doing as you say, if not have Google's board of directors hauled out into the street and shot like dogs.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
That's just fucking stupid - a link is a reference, not a copy.
If you can't reference copyrighted works, nobody can legally say "I read **CENSORED** the other day, it was great". Similarly, movie reviews would be banned. and telling people about newspaper or magazine articles they read. and lots of other everyday fair-use references to copyrighted works.
Election of such officials can also result in the position becoming very over-politicised - you end up with public prosecutors being elected because they promise they will turn a blind eye to certain crimes, or pledge to do whatever it takes to bring down a certain organisation regardless of guilt. Low-level officials end up trying to make policy* rather than simply enforce it.
America is a good example of how this can end, because their government has more layers than most. It's quite common to see the government actively fighting the government - federal, state and local officials all trying to advance contradictory agendas, and all trying to weasel their way around the courts. It can make for some very strange laws.
*I propose that a local official trying to overrule a larger-scale law without proper authority be referred to as 'Kim Davising.'
I don't know if it's still true but, at one time, they did have a bit of a gap. I've personally tested this due to some comments on a webmaster forum that I frequented back in the day. Here's how it worked...
Make a directory, put a simple html file in it.
Include a robots.txt with the noindex tag.
Link other pages on your site to that new html file.
Wait until site is crawled by Google's bot.
Search for the html file by exact URL.
Document is listed in the search results - with content of the document in the description.
I have no idea if it still works. You had to link it from your own domain (I think) and it needed some certain number (unknown - didn't work with just a few) links to the document. I assume it was a bug. I'm guessing it was fixed by now. This would have been 2007-2008 area, as I recall?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Proudly born in the USA, 1969.
Murdered by cowardly Europeans, 2015.
Euros are Nazi pedophiles, I say burn them with nukes. You meet any euroslut, shoot it between the eyes.
It is already telling that the EU has a commissioner for digital policy (wtf?!).
Of course the guy has hardly ever seen an actual web page, and if so someone printed it out for him. He is a scapegoat of big industry, only recently to be seen to push through the new directive on "guaranteed net neutrality" which of course does the opposite. Incidentally the next day after parliament accepted the proposal German Telecom's chairman announced that his company is looking to charge startups for "special services" a few percentage of their revenue, which he deemed a "fair deal". Of course Oettinger applauded and cheered in via twitter announcing what great achiement he had just accomplished. On the plus side he got sh**t stormed immediately.
Now the same Oettinger comes forward with this stupidiest of ideas to make hyperlinks subject to copyright restrictions. Oh btw he prides himself of making Europe a digital eldorado. Wasteland more likely by the looks of it.
If it were not so obviously sad it would be hilarious. It's Yes Minister all over again.
Then the USA has already waged a frontal attack on the hyperlink.
Because someone invented the term doesn't mean they invented the thing named.
I read the entire document linked from the anti-EU politician and nowhere could I find the claim she is making. This is quite typical of anti-EU UK politicians - they complain about something the EU has done or is doing... in their imagination.
~_~ Not tonight, dear, I have a modem.
I agree completely.
The www is teeming with stories of people being bullied in court by corps that feel injured by seemingly innocuous hyperlinks to some of their public pages. The best way to avoid the pain is to regroup all those mined pages under an unique, and easily recognizable, banner.
I really think it can, and should, be done. The easiest way is to include put all those pages in a particular domain, like ".special" :
- corps that want to put a page in that domain have to pay a special fee to some transgovernmental institution, and describe in a special header what is allowed and not allowed for that uri
- corps that want to robot search that domain have to pay a special fee to the same institution
That way, all those greedy/paranoid corps will be happy, while actually putting themselves in a ghetto where nobody will hear about them and have any interest in their activities.
And the rest of the Internet will experience more freedom than ever.
You mean you don't approve of female suffrage? You orchicrat, you!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What do you expect from a bunch of coke abusing child-raping autocratic lawyers who are nothing more than wholly owned subsidiaries of multi-national corporations? You expect behavior like this.
Well, the same thing holds true for the EC; you expect this kind of thing from this group of people, too.
In the UK you don't need to be an MP to be a minister either.
That doesn't stop the Commission being a corrupt malignant force damaging democracy.
How do "Publishers filter out bad writers" better than Internet reviews do? Three decades ago, the entry barrier associated with the Official Nintendo Seal made sense for a video game industry struggling to recover after the 1983 crash. But in 2015, we have a decentralized review scene on the Internet to help game buyers avoid crap.
This is not "content industry misconception". The traditional media industry wants hyperlinks to go because hyperlinks essentially promote competition and evens out the playing field to new content providers and entrepreneurs. If the industry does not want their content to be linked to, they can perfectly well put Disallow in their robots.txt, but that is not the goal. The goal is to stop competing new industries and companies from being created. It is cheaper to use corrupt politicians to destroy or slow competition than develop something new or compete with efficiency. It is not happening just in media area, media is just most visible.
This is why large media managed lobby to outlaw links in Spain, driving sites like google news out. Not to protect their content, but to screw the smaller media companies and outside competition. If the larger content companies would have put in their robots configuration file "deny indexing", the public would have soon found the smaller news sites and other content through search engines and aggregators, and ad business would have followed the public. So Spain ruled it all illegal and does not allow opt-out. This essentially prevents new media companies from being created as they cannot get indexed either, as they are not even allowed to say google that "We are happy if you index our site". It would be interesting to see how this played out, what are Spanish people using as their news sources, can they use outside aggregators which link to global Spanish-speaking sites?
If I walk into a library, I can search their catalog or I can walk down the aisle of documents, reading the library call number and/or the boot title.
If I do a comparison, I have to ask myself, what is the difference between a document title on a bookshelf, and a hyperlink in a web page?
If I don't retrieve the book, its like I did not click onto the hyperlink.
Presumably, a webpage may be copyrighted, and I bet that even the copyright holder has icons on it, or links to other copyright material not owned by him.
This is stupidity and we should just use common sense.
Its like saying, clicking on the link with a mouse makes a difference if I used the left mouse button versus the right mouse button, or a mouse with no button or scroll wheel.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The point about political posturing for elections is duly noted, of course, but the primary issue is each link is a potential weak-point between the election and the appointed official. You only need one person in the chain to cave to pressure from a special interest to corrupt the end-result. Each person represents a likely point of failure/corruption.
They want to make the EU the most attractive market in the world.
By all means let them introduce this measure, and see how it agrees with growth in the market.
(And I'm all for well-regulated markets.)
For those still needed to understand how the EU is ruled, here is a quick primer. Feel free to add more if you think it's relevant:
1) there are 3 groups in charge of the EU: the European Council, the European Commission and the European Parliament.
2) members of the European Parliament are elected by European citizens via your usual voting booth.
3) members of the European Commission are not elected but appointed by their respective country of origin's government.
4) members of the European Council are in fact the heads of European government plus the president of the European Commission
You can see from that arrangement that exactly one group is elected and consequently renders an account to the electors. In this case, it's a member of the European Parliament that raises the flag on a proposal from a member of the European Commission.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
None of this shit should be monetized anyway, free culture should flow between the people not some shitty coporations.
Simple remedy: do not link to copyrighted material. Do not tweet or otherwise recommend anything that is copyrighted. Just for one month. Then watch where the action is.