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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.
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!
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.
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.
This doesn't originate with politicians, it comes from corporate lobbyists for publishers, newspapers, etc. Those corporations hold a lot of power in Europe and they are seeing their business models and fortunes destroyed by the Internet. And since politicians in Europe are highly dependent on the goodwill of these publishers (not having a lot of other channels for reaching voters), they respond to this kind of pressure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
" Those corporations hold a lot of power in Europe"...actually, they hold LESS power in the EU than they do in the US, were in some aspects they are considered on the same level (and above) than actual citizens. Corporations in the USA also have "free speech", and are allowed to spend money in political campaigns as much as they want. They also have religious beliefs, like how the Hobby Lobby corporation successfully argued it's "closely held beliefs" said certain birth control is actually an abortion even though medical science proves otherwise. Corporations can kill thousands of people, destroy ecosystems, yet there is no "death penalty" for corps that's been used since the trust busts. And in other countries, corps have more power than the local government including their own armed forces.