<story><title>European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/european-copyright-law-isnt-great-it-could-soon-get-lot-worse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IAmEveryone</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a strange interpretation, and I say it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like you&amp;#x27;re trying too hard to assume good faith.&lt;p&gt;The EU is worried about publishers both big and small. Currently, investing half a year&amp;#x27;s worth of a journalist&amp;#x27;s work into investigations is a rather bad business decision, because everyone can freely reuse the facts you uncovered: spend a year finding corruption, write it up in a day, 10 minutes later it&amp;#x27;s on AP.&lt;p&gt;Ther &amp;#x27;inalienable&amp;#x27; is to ensure you&amp;#x27;re not pressured into giving those rights away by a stronger actor such as Google. The principle is the same that makes it impossible for you to agree to buy something new without warranty.&lt;p&gt;Your idea also doesn&amp;#x27;t make much sense because the current crisis of journalism has hit smaller publishers hardest. The New York Times will survive. The Bodunken Tribune is probably long dead already. And the major players for centralization are obviously Google and Facebook, the two largest targets of this legislation.&lt;p&gt;All this DOES NOT mean I believe this proposal to be a good idea! I think it&amp;#x27;s too much beaurocracy for too little effect, plus probably unintended consequences.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s hard to completely disregard the true motivation and ascribe malice.</text></item><item><author>mattsfrey</author><text>&amp;quot;The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the &amp;quot;link tax&amp;quot; proposal, which would establish a special copyright-like fee to be paid by websites to news publishers, in exchange for the privilege of using short snippets of quoted text as part of a link to the original news article. Voss&amp;#x27;s latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is horrendous.&lt;p&gt;I generally favor: &amp;quot;Do not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;However this seems like a blatant attempt to shut down any interpretive or third party news sites in favor of centralized media control.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whatshisface</author><text>Appearing 10 minutes later on AP would have nothing to do with the link tax, as AP would be able to paraphrase your results. In fact, it&amp;#x27;s currently Google that favors the smaller investigator (over what the situation would be without Google): the smaller page would get a pagerank boost from all of the very important websites linking to it. Without Google, AP would have traffic from people who check it manually and nobody else would get anything. Being the first to publish comes with a small advantage in Google&amp;#x27;s world and no advantage outside.</text></comment>
<story><title>European Copyright Law Could Soon Get Worse</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/european-copyright-law-isnt-great-it-could-soon-get-lot-worse</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>IAmEveryone</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s a strange interpretation, and I say it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like you&amp;#x27;re trying too hard to assume good faith.&lt;p&gt;The EU is worried about publishers both big and small. Currently, investing half a year&amp;#x27;s worth of a journalist&amp;#x27;s work into investigations is a rather bad business decision, because everyone can freely reuse the facts you uncovered: spend a year finding corruption, write it up in a day, 10 minutes later it&amp;#x27;s on AP.&lt;p&gt;Ther &amp;#x27;inalienable&amp;#x27; is to ensure you&amp;#x27;re not pressured into giving those rights away by a stronger actor such as Google. The principle is the same that makes it impossible for you to agree to buy something new without warranty.&lt;p&gt;Your idea also doesn&amp;#x27;t make much sense because the current crisis of journalism has hit smaller publishers hardest. The New York Times will survive. The Bodunken Tribune is probably long dead already. And the major players for centralization are obviously Google and Facebook, the two largest targets of this legislation.&lt;p&gt;All this DOES NOT mean I believe this proposal to be a good idea! I think it&amp;#x27;s too much beaurocracy for too little effect, plus probably unintended consequences.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s hard to completely disregard the true motivation and ascribe malice.</text></item><item><author>mattsfrey</author><text>&amp;quot;The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the &amp;quot;link tax&amp;quot; proposal, which would establish a special copyright-like fee to be paid by websites to news publishers, in exchange for the privilege of using short snippets of quoted text as part of a link to the original news article. Voss&amp;#x27;s latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is horrendous.&lt;p&gt;I generally favor: &amp;quot;Do not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;However this seems like a blatant attempt to shut down any interpretive or third party news sites in favor of centralized media control.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ubernostrum</author><text>If a newspaper in a town of 1,000 people was devoting half a year of a reporter&amp;#x27;s work to a single investigation, that newspaper was already going to fail as a business. Even if every link to the eventual story required the linker to pay €100, because in that case people would just refuse to link.&lt;p&gt;There is nothing good about link taxes. And sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, this cannot help even responsibly-run small news organizations, because it will just direct all the large aggregators and large news companies to make deals with each other, and the small news companies will get zero links and collect zero &amp;quot;link tax&amp;quot;, and small&amp;#x2F;new aggregators will not be able to afford to operate. Result: large organizations stay large, small ones continue going out of business.&lt;p&gt;Someone on Twitter earlier was saying journalism has a history of relying on rich people who don&amp;#x27;t mind losing money (the modern example being Bezos and the Washington Post), and that we&amp;#x27;re trending back that way. Anyone who can&amp;#x27;t find a patron is probably going to go out of business no matter what.&lt;p&gt;(unless you&amp;#x27;d like to have news organizations be funded by government, which can work but has its own set of problems)</text></comment>