And it's very telling, regarding the quality of journalism nowadays, that the battlefield has moved to fighting over who gets to monetize headlines pointing to content that's too shitty for people to click through to.<p>Regarding links that people actually click on, the current situation is that it'll take users to the publishers' websites, where the publisher monetizes it through advertising. Nothing wrong with that.<p>But, apparently, that's not enough. Because the state of journalism has been reduced to providing headlines that make people go "...naaaah. not worth it."<p>At the same time, the way they lobbied for this law was based on the notion that media companies don't get adequately rewarded for the bang-up job that they're doing, creating all this high-quality and highly original content.
What we see is the logical extension of what's required for continuation of the copyright system: a highly regulated Internet where nothing can be published unless its copyright status has been accurately identified. Only authorized people can be relied on to produce new content, otherwise there's no way to tell if they just copied it from someone else.<p>The next step would be to shut down proxies, systems such as Tor, and connections to sites in rogue states that don't sufficiently enforce copyright.
The analysis of Article 11 is misleading. The actually relevant part is in Article 11 (3), which incorporates (by reference) the usual limitations and exceptions to copyright [1], including the right to quote. This is necessary, anyway, because the Berne convention mandates that right [2].<p>Article 11 targets news aggregators and search engines. Unlike blog posts or newspaper articles, they generally cannot benefit from the right to quote [3]. Article 11 has two goals. One, it aims at protecting pieces of a work that are generally too short to enjoy regular copyright protection; second, unlike the usual practice in continental European copyright law, it grants ancillary copyright to publishers, not authors, for easier enforcement of these rights.<p>Note that this does not mean that I endorse Article 11 (I do not and actually consider it harmful and the result of misguided lobbying), but we should be clear what we are actually talking about.<p>[1] Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC.<p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_quote</a><p>[3] As the Wikipedia article above summarizes it, "the resulting new work is not just a collection of quotations, but constitutes a fully original work in itself".
The report released is here: [1]
And a pdf of it is here:[2]<p>[1]<a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fTEXT%2bREPORT%2bA8-2018-0245%2b0%2bDOC%2bXML%2bV0%2f%2fEN&language=EN#title1" rel="nofollow">http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f...</a>
[2]<a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A8-2018-0245+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN" rel="nofollow">http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...</a>
Query: if this directive passes and the outcomes are in line with the negative predictions, what happens?<p>If it becomes standard practice for all except certain large corporations to ban all EU addresses, how will this impact the web and the EU?
I'm a pro EU remain voter who respects the results of the referendum in the UK. If this law passes, I will be a former pro EU remain voter, and will flip to the leave camp (should my vote ever be required for a second referendum). This will be going too far.
I think the better point about hyperlinking is that you shouldn't have something so ambiguous at the center of the law concerning the use of the Internet.
The proposal is bad enough, but I don't believe the part about URLs being considered snippets. URLs are technically necessary for linking and any publisher can decide what goes into their URLs.<p>Rather than lawyers not understanding technology I think this interpretation is just the reverse.
This discussion is informative but narrowly focused on the latest draft.<p>Can anyone post some links to a long form article that can explain how we got here and what is the logical fulfillment of these forces?<p>To me it looks like the destruction of the internet and transformation to a new version of televison.
While I fundamentally oppose this proposed legislation, I wonder whether the law becoming inhospitable to centralized services like Google, Twitter, and so on, could have the positive effect of pushing users towards a more free decentralised and less commercial Internet.
If this law passes and the EU loses access to the current functionality of Google, HN, Github, Facebook and Twitter, can EU companies build local versions of those services, like China did?
> Because it still creates a license requirement on a snippet of any length,<p>No it doesn't.<p>For fucks sake, the law is lousy, but we don't need shit articles from techdirt who are completely unable to read and understand law.