The European Commission is preparing an attack on the hyperlink

I think I&#x27;ve given up on sane legislation with regards to technology.<p>Not only does technology advance much faster than law, but law makers are almost by definition two generations behind the generation that actually is native to the technological change in question. It&#x27;s not possible to win in that situation.<p>You&#x27;re asking someone whose paradigm of video was formed by the advent of color TV, to understand the cultural and technological consequences of popcorn time. It&#x27;s like the tech problems of WWI: generals who only knew cavalry rushes continued ordering i calvary rushes, even against machine gun fire and even against staggering numbers of dead.<p>So I think I give up now. Technological issues may as well ignore the legal framework, because the legal framework ignores the technological issues. If we stop fighting, the rules will get so ridiculous as to he openly impossible to satisfy, offering industries the choice to either ignore them, or go out of business. In the end this stuff doesn&#x27;t strangle the open sourcers or the hacker culture... It only strangles big industry, the people pay the legislators&#x27; paychecks. So fuck em. Legislators can figure it out when it hits their tax receipts.

&quot;And it&#x27;s clear: When, like that, the number of subscribers dramatically declines, young people no longer subscribe to newspapers as my generation did, when the number of papers sold at newsstands declines, when the classified ads for the labour market, for used cars and for apartments decline because it all becomes an online service then newspapers are in existential danger. One can either accept that, or act now – in five years it would be too late.&quot;<p>I say, let them die. Most newspapers are a joke. I don&#x27;t subscribe to them because it&#x27;s actually a way to become misinformed about any specific topic. Or at least that&#x27;s what I see in their take of any topic I know profoundly.<p>There are alternatives. Reader-supported news like LWN seem to be working. I get most of my content from topic specific websites, blogs, and mail lists.<p>About the classified ads. Why is that a problem at all?<p>&quot;Maybe Google will only accept an European provision, accept European instruments because then, if needed, via the competition law and the European Commissioner for Competition measures, penalties and legal action in case of breach of European rules are possible&quot;<p>Transcription -&gt; Steal.

So we need to go through the legalese in detail and make new definitions of slightly modified original concepts so that the law can&#x27;t be applied to them anymore - like what the pharma industry does with rebranding old medicine by changing the formula slightly. Ideally, that should also be polymorphic in nature, i.e. the definition&#x2F;implementation could be changed easily algorithmically. Unless there is some radical change to the law making it algorithmic, it would always be trailing a few years behind.<p>As an EU citizen, it&#x27;s mind-boggling to see the sheer stupidity of our politicians in the past 2-3 years...

This is one of the reasons why the IT industry in the EU is so weak when compared to the US.<p>As a citizen of an EU state I can&#x27;t help but feel that we are here governed by complete morons.

&gt; judges established that the simple act of linking to publicly available content is no copyright infringement, because it does not reach a new public, a few questions were left open bis this ruling, however: For example when exactly content can be seen as accessible by the public and how e.g. links surpassing paywalls are to be treated.<p>Links surpassing paywalls are a non-issue, IMO. Those coming-from-Google paywall bypasses are put in place <i>by the content copyright holders</i> specifically for the purpose of making that possible. If they didn&#x27;t want their paywall bypassed, they wouldn&#x27;t have built (or would turn off) their paywall bypass for search engines.

I don&#x27;t understand. Help me. Why do you even PUT content at a linkable url online if you don&#x27;t want anyone linking to it?<p>If I wanted to control exactly who views my content and where they come from I can just check headers for internal linking or generate unique single-use URLs for each visitor.<p>What is the practical scenario that this legislation aims to cover?

I no longer care.. fuck it. Let them break the internet. We will not be the only one to face the consequences.<p>I for one, started hoarding data, scraping good websites for valuable information while I still can.

I would have thought that those in European nations would have learned from their mistakes by now. Spain did this, initially only some companies demanded money and so Google just removed them from the index. Then the companies realised it was a disaster.<p>Then the Spanish government made it mandatory for everyone to pay the media companies, regardless - and they weren&#x27;t allowed to do it directly either. They had to pay the state, who then paid the publisher. Nobody was allowed to opt-out. So Google News pulled out entirely. It was an unmitigated disaster... for the publishers:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;new-study-shows-spains-google-tax-has-been-a-disaster-for-publishers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;new-study-shows-s...</a><p>To quote that article:<p><i>Whatever loss of traffic occurs due to readers who may read a news aggregator and then choose not to read an entire story, is more than made up for by the &quot;market expansion&quot; effect, the study found. In other words, given access to a news aggregator like Google, people read much more news.</i><p><i>The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.</i>

Am I the only one who finds these regulations increasingly funny?<p>I want to see how they would react to URL shortening services, base64-encoded outgoing redirects, links injections only on click events; you know, the gray tactics the whole internet already uses!<p>Please explain this one thing to me: why don&#x27;t politicians work with field experts? Not just IT, but any domain, really.

And another strike by the same EU Digital Economy commissioner (!) that &quot;had no sympathy for Jennifer Lawrence when she happens to post her private pictures online&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m pretty hopeless, especially because there&#x27;s no way on gods green earth to get rid of this guy. EU is so high above country level politics (yet defines &gt;80% of laws in the end), it&#x27;s hard to even get people to the voting booth. And even if they do, it&#x27;s completely parliamentary, no chance to influence anything.<p>It doesn&#x27;t help that completely incompetent politicians in the country parties get dilbertized one level up so they &quot;can&#x27;t hurt anymore&quot;. This pirate politician is about the only one there decently transparent and accountable.

A hyperlink is the same as a reference in a book. That means referencing a precise portion of a book (for instance, ISBN + page number, or just title + publisher + chapter number) would become a copyright violation too.<p>I&#x27;m not sure the EC is conscious of that, because it would have huge consequences. The cost of academic research papers, for instance, with their pages full of references, would become dramatically high to produce, or even impossible (what if I don&#x27;t want you to talk about my works ?)

Has any organization formally estimated the worldwide, annual economic value generated by the open internet? When copyright (intended to promote the generation of creative works) is abused for control, the loser is the legitimacy of copyright. Those who want control should invent new mechanisms that are specifically for control, instead of hiding behind and squandering the legitimate role of copyright.

Any fellow Europeans here, who remember the good old time, when we used to make jokes about American Politics being so stupid?<p>I feel sad, very sad.

<i>&quot;the simple act of linking to publicly available content is no copyright infringement, because it does not reach a new public</i>&quot;<p>That&#x27;s not really the most straight forward reasoning? I&#x27;d say linking is not COPYright infringement because nothing is ever copied.

lol. it wouldn&#x27;t break the internet. it would just break european websites. I applaud Julia&#x27;s euro-centric ego though.<p>I agree though, let them do it. Someone has to show everyone what nonsense this is. Cautionary tales serve a purpose.

If you are a EU citizen, vote pirate in the EU elections.<p>We got Christian Engström last term, and we have Julia Reda this term. They&#x27;re doing a ton of good. We need more.

IPFS, anyone?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.io&#x2F;</a>

When you have a culture of statism this is what you get. You elect governments that want to and do micromanage your lives.<p>Don&#x27;t blame it on the politicians. You guys elected these people. They&#x27;re just following the ideology of their politics.

I think it&#x27;s a great idea because those media companies will get crippled when everyone stops linking to them. What a great way to put a serious dent in an annoying industry.

This is so broken.<p>I&#x27;m giving up. The political system is broken beyond repair.

It really doesn&#x27;t matter, I will make my own internet.

Why are tech companies so bad at lobbying? If a small, dying industry like publishing is strong enough to push through stuff like this, why can&#x27;t cash-flush tech companies combat it?

When I lock my front door and leave a spare key under the doormat, my insurance company is not obliged by law to pay for any damages if the spare key is used by thieves to enter my house. I could have easily prevented the situation.<p>Content publishers should properly lock their front doors, too, and not have spare keys lying around all over the place.

Silly for digital media to try and leech off of the more successful tech cos. In general, digital media is scrambling with various monetization strategies. But they&#x27;re thinking about the problem wrong. They obsess over how to monetize people already <i>on</i> their site. Instead, they should start asking how they can monetize people <i>coming</i> to their site. I think the proposition linked by OP is a very premature recognition of that. The proposed solution is way out in left field, but there are saner approaches, such as the use of interstitial advertising. Of course, now adblockers become relevant to the discussion, and I won&#x27;t go down that rabbit hole (here, at least.)<p>Disclosure: I operate a link shortener [1] that pays people based on their traffic using interstitial advertising.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;credhot.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;credhot.com</a>

Will this also way the other way around ? I.e. will newspapers also need to pay if they link to external source?

Time to play devil&#x27;s advocate and do a thought experiment. What if we created a site containing every word and every conjugation in a way that could be linked to. This work is clearly not a copyright violation. What if we then wrote a &quot;compression&quot; program that took any text file and converted it to a file containing only links to this site. Few would argue that is not a copyright violation. Yet the resulting file contains nothing of the original, it is just a link. If linking to a whole text with a single link is not a copyright violation, at what point between that and our &quot;compressed&quot; file does it cross the line, and why?<p>Or, put another way, if links had been copyright violations from the start, would we think that it was a sensible and logical characteristic of copyright?

Remember all these sites that ban hyperlinking to them in their ToS:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=Hyperlinking+to+the+Site+from+any+other+website+without+our+initial+and+ongoing+consent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=Hyperlinking+to+the+Site+fro...</a>

Since democracy seems incapable of progressing with changes in the world, would it ever be possible to have a bureaucratic technocracy? Something where technocrats write up and implement legislation rather than people who have no understanding?

I&#x27;d like to know how many of the people complaining here about their legislators have called, written, or visited* (yes you can do that) said legislators to help educate them.<p>*In the U.S.

Just let them pass the legislation. Any media company actually trying to enforce their &quot;rights&quot; will promptly die.

Hyperlinks are not a problem. Government is a problem. The EA and it&#x27;s legislators are a problem.

when was internet free? i always have paid to use it. i understand free software but internet is here cause an infrastructure was created and deployed (means paid). my lan is free (cause i paid for that).<p>i don&#x27;t get the point. someone wants to control a wan. is that a news?

Internet already has this. If you want to be paid by google for linking to your site you just need to put NOINDEX in proper place in the page header. Though it&#x27;s really up to google if they choose to list you and pay you or not list you.

What exactly makes a text a hyperlink?<p>Does it have to be only the usual &lt;a href=&quot;#&quot;&gt;text&lt;&#x2F;a&gt; ?<p>What if I do this: &lt;div link=&quot;#&quot;&gt;text&lt;&#x2F;div&gt;<p>And then I use JavaScript to redirect, is it still considered a hyperlink?<p>Have I just found a loop hole? :)

There&#x27;s a lot of &quot;considering&quot; and &quot;seems&quot; in the article, and skimming the leaked document I didn&#x27;t find anything definite either. So I&#x27;m not particulary worried.

Let it pass. Let these nimwits embarrass themselves.

Maybe before establishing all these EU bureaucracies they should have focused on establishing a strong bill of rights. The first amendment at least in the US would almost certainly prevent nonsense like this.<p>The EU commissions overall feel like they are flailing around making up the rules they go. At least when courts in the US disagree, it is about adherence to precedent and the constitution, not appeasing whatever group is lobbying them at the time.

Take Ottinger out of the Commission, and this idea will die. He was the one pushing for such a tax in Germany, too. He has strong ties with GEMA there.