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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.
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.
Lemme take a shot at this one:
Maps are illegal - they provide access to the locations of private land. We should ask every landowner if they want to appear on a map.
e.g. I can't tell you where the coffee shop is, because that would be providing access. Lemme ask the owner of the shop first. I'm sure he'll be okay with you knowing but I should check.
We're no longer allowed to talk about things that are illegal? This is the censorship of knowledge.
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!
That is of limited comfort to me. If people keep trying it, they could eventually succeed. They need to stop even trying something so asinine.
Like terrorists, they only have to succeed once.