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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.
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!
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".
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
This comes up every six months. It never gets beyond a proposal.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.