c3o (Christopher Clay), who works in the EU Parliament according to his profile, posted several informative comments including one explaining the backstory behind the proposed legislation:
> First, it's no secret that the intent is to prop up the business model of struggling publishers by getting internet platforms to pay them for spreading (links to/tiny snippets of) their content.
> After a "link tax" law was introduced in Germany, some publishers decided to waive it. Google reacted by removing snippets from those who didn't in Google News, making their links less likely to be clicked on. Afraid of losing traffic, these publishers then granted Google a free license.
> The government of Spain looked at this result and decided to implement the idea as an inalienable right, to make sure some publishers couldn't opt out, and Google would have to pay up. In response, Google shut down Google News altogether in Spain.
> This is the version that the Parliament's chief negotiator now wants the EU to implement. He believes that Google (and Facebook and Twitter, which have been added as targets) wouldn't dare shut down a service across all of Europe.
This dude seems to think that it's a dick measuring contest, when it reality it boils down to a cost-benefit analysis. If Google thinks it will lose money, it will shut down the service.
It is a dick measuring contest to a degree. Google is large enough to be effectively a monopoly, and so can think of these laws as being targeted at them. The way they respond to these laws affects the way other nations set up their own laws. Even if they lost money in spain by closing there, they would close anyways if they thought they would gain across the globe.
If they shut down in europe they also open up the field for their competition. There are many developers here in europe that are just waiting for a chance.
Chance to pay link tax? This thing basically makes news aggregation unprofitable. It's better to just make up your own news stories. Maybe even get sponsored by Russia if you make ones beneficial for them.
Someone will fill that void. It may take a while for the new winner to emerge, but it will happen, and then they will be in the exact same position as Google news.
This law won't change the structure of the internet, it will just change the players. People want free news aggregators and other countries will not enforce this silly law (see also: cookie notices).
To prevent possible confusion, I should first note that there are several different ways users may find news articles via Google: in search results, suggested articles in mobile Chrome, articles in your Google feed (formerly Google Now), the Google Play Newsstand app (which unlike the others supports paid subscriptions), and probably others I'm forgetting.
Personally, I use Google News because it's better at finding news I want to read than other aggregators (including other feeds from Google itself, at least for a while). The options to customize the topics I'm interested in and to block/prefer certain news sources are tremendously useful, while at same time it also brings up news from sources I haven't heard of before so I'm not limited to a handpicked selection.
Google News is also good for browsing articles from many different sources about a single news story. Most news cards show at least two, and you can expand the card and click "view full coverage" to bring up all the related articles. Makes it easy to peruse all the coverage.
I check it most days as I like to skim a variety of international news sources in one list. I'd welcome suggestions of alternatives - especially if I could filter out the Daily Mail and other low quality sources.
You can filter out the Daily Mail in Google News, too. Scroll down to "See news from your favorite sources" for how to block/prefer certain sources: https://support.google.com/news/answer/1146405
I guess you don’t like the Daily Mail because it’s a source of nationalist sensationalism rubbish at its worst, and I completely agree with you about that.
But I’m worried that, by filtering it out, we create tribal echo chambers. Personally, I hold my nose, read at least some of the articles, and try to argue against them.
When I search for bitcoin, I get random sites. But when I wanna know why the price just jumped/crashed, I click on news and see why people panic bought/sold this time.
"The biggest and most worrisome changes are to the "link tax" 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's latest amendments would make the link tax an inalienable right, that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to."
"...that news publishers cannot waive even if they choose to."
This is horrendous.
I generally favor: "Do not ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
However this seems like a blatant attempt to shut down any interpretive or third party news sites in favor of centralized media control.
That's a strange interpretation, and I say it doesn't seem like you're trying too hard to assume good faith.
The EU is worried about publishers both big and small. Currently, investing half a year's worth of a journalist'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's on AP.
Ther 'inalienable' is to ensure you'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.
Your idea also doesn'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.
All this DOES NOT mean I believe this proposal to be a good idea! I think it's too much beaurocracy for too little effect, plus probably unintended consequences.
But it's hard to completely disregard the true motivation and ascribe malice.
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'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's world and no advantage outside.
If a newspaper in a town of 1,000 people was devoting half a year of a reporter'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.
There is nothing good about link taxes. And sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
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 "link tax", and small/new aggregators will not be able to afford to operate. Result: large organizations stay large, small ones continue going out of business.
Someone on Twitter earlier was saying journalism has a history of relying on rich people who don't mind losing money (the modern example being Bezos and the Washington Post), and that we're trending back that way. Anyone who can't find a patron is probably going to go out of business no matter what.
(unless you'd like to have news organizations be funded by government, which can work but has its own set of problems)
> Someone on Twitter earlier was saying journalism has a history of relying on rich people who don't mind losing money (the modern example being Bezos and the Washington Post), and that we're trending back that way. Anyone who can't find a patron is probably going to go out of business no matter what.
I'm not sure it can (or should) be any other way. If you try to run journalism as a for-profit business, you end up with ads and clickbait. Good journalism is like medicine - very important, and very unable to bring in profit.
The way I look at it is it will constrain the ability to deliver news to those who can afford to produce original content, which will be larger outlets with more resources. This allows a vastly smaller group to control the narrative.
How will this effect google or facebook at all?
Anyone with a blog looking to quote a news outlet and provide commentary is now mandatorily taxed? How do you NOT see this as bad? What good can come of it at all?
Google and Facebook show titles and quotes of linked articles. This legislation is specifically aimed at them. Noncommercial actors (bloggers etc) are supposed to be exempt.
> How do you NOT see this as bad?
It is extremely frustrating how people on HN apparently have no ability to acknowledge a valid argument for a position they oppose. Read the last two paragraphs of my post again. It clearly states, in rule-braking all-caps even, that I do not support this legislation.
> What good can come of it at all?
It will shift (as you note) money from those reprinting news to those producing original content. The former is cheap, commoditized, and in no danger. The latter is fundamental for a functioning democracy.
>Noncommercial actors (bloggers etc) are supposed to be exempt.
Looking at EU's history of jurisdiction in these matters, this usually means almost no one is considered "noncommercial". You better believe this is going to hit small bloggers hard. C&D-happy lawyers are going to have a field day.
Facebook _users_ do. I highly doubt they are going to try and enforce this on google search results, that would be absurd, and if so it will just hurt the publishers for not getting hits. Where is it detailed that this is aimed at google/fb ?
Despite your condescending rebuttal I actually am disagreeing with your position. I don't think this is good for democracy in that having the cash to produce original content imposes no responsibility and this legislation would stifle third party analysis and criticism of their reporting. Making these arguments and then adding a "but yeah in general I'm not in favor" doesn't shield you from criticism.
Democracy is in danger because publishers, large and small, lack the discipline and expertise to produce objective, quality reporting, and give a voice to people with something interesting to say.
Nobody forced them to chase clickbait or spend their days sourcing stories from Twitter and Tumblr. That's all on them.
And before you think that's an exaggeration, I'm talking about one of my (European) country's major national papers whose daily front page now consists of breathless American political drama, hashtags and gender politics. It's ridiculous, the children are running the show, the writing is atrocious, and their world view is about as sophisticated as a first year pol-sci major who's never held a real job.
Get those people to shut up and we'll be far better off. I look forward to their tears. If their content was worth it, they wouldn't be struggling.
Your entire position revolves around shackling google to serve the political interests of Brussels, to the point where Brussels wants to mandate a business model to the very people they claim to be helping. It's even weirder because Google is not a competitor to the newspapers, so going after them is nonsensical. It's not a compelling position and it brings to mind the old fable of the goose that lays the golden eggs.
> The latter is fundamental for a functioning democracy.
But if distributors have to pay to link to such content, then such content will not contribute to a functioning democracy because nobody will be able to discover this content.
And, it's funny you mention "functioning democracy" -- tell me how Brussels is part of a functioning democracy? The European Commission President and commissioners aren't elected are they? The Commission has the sole right to propose EU legislation -- which is binding on all member states.
So a Commission that isn't elected gets to force it's will on otherwise democratic countries?
How is that "functioning democracy?" A bit ironic that an undemocratic institution's actions are being defended as protecting something fundamental to a functioning democracy.
It's funny to me as an American living in Europe that many people criticize the US Electoral College system to elect the US president, yet see no problem with accepting the regime of the European Commission, despite not getting a vote on the the Commission President or Commissioners.
>> So a Commission that isn't elected gets to force it's will on otherwise democratic countries?
The Commission is staffed by elected politicians, one for every country of the EU. The Commission's President is elected by members of the European Parliament, themselves elected directly by the people of the EU member states in the European Elections, held every 4 years.
The Commission is a legislative body; it makes legislation, but legislation must be passed into law by voting in the European Parliament by MEPs.
A lot has been made into the eurosceptic press about the "non-democratic" nature of the EU. These news items overlook the difference between an elected politician and an official appointed by elected politicians. For example, US Supreme Court Justices are nominated by the US President and confirmed by the Senate and they are the final arbiters of fedral law, not to mention their appointment is lifelong.
You know, if the claim is "the current system does not lead to a functioning democracy", saying "but you don't have a functioning democracy" is not an opposing argument.
Actually the majority of people in my country have a problem with that. It's hard to solve when your government is filled with "business"men taking EU dotations though.
If the matter was only about weakening the external monopolies, than the tactics are definitely really really bad.
The pain and trouble that this legislation would generate to Europe and to the whole world is much worse than say Google's monopoly.
I believe if the EU had an honest intention of only undermining monopolies from countries outside the EU (mainly the US), then it should find another way to go with it without disrupting the whole open knowledge concept. Otherwise, it will be truly disasterous.
> it doesn't seem like you're trying too hard to assume good faith
The same EU that regulated the shape of cucumbers? They regulated shapes of bananas. The EU also launched a kettle and toaster crackdown after the Brexit vote. [1] -- but hid those plans until after the vote.
This is also the EU that hid plans to ban high powered kettles and toasters until after the Brexit vote so they wouldn't fuel the Leave campaign. So the EU says, "Let's keep this unpopular stuff a secret so we don't piss off the British and cause the vote to swing to Leave."
The same EU that banned effective, powerful vacuum cleaners because of climate change? [2] The EU that would have people living in straw huts if it meant a 0.001% decline in CO2?
This manipulative, vindictive EU that hid their intentions from the British public because they knew those intentions would be unpopular?
To assume "good faith" on the part of the EU for any reason, is, itself, an act of faith and more likely, an act of delusion.
Ah, the old banana myth. How the EU forced banana producers to only produce or sell bananas with the right curvature.
Only... that‘s not true. The EU defined quality classes for all kinds of products. And in the case of bananas these included curvature.
Producers could still sell whatever curved bananas they liked. At whatever price they liked. They just couldn‘t claim it conformed to this specific quality class.
Because free trade includes regulations like that. Traders want to establish a baseline what‘s acceptable to most of them and not specify every product detail in every shipment.
Yup. The usual bullshit spun by British tabloids, that somehow then gets reprinted as facts on continental Europe. There were plenty of other similar cases regarding classification and quality classes of seafood, water, juices, etc.
People seem to be so desperate to believe the government is this big, incompetent force of evil that they'll uncritically accept any story that confirms that belief.
It was such a competent piece of legislation that it was dropped by the EU when commonsense finally penetrated the minds of the 'we're paid to dream up laws so let's get on with it' secretive team in Brussels.
Also, the EU didn't invent the idea of quality classes for produce - they already existed in most EU countries, because they are genuinely useful (primarily for wholesale buyers, who benefit from knowing more exactly what they'll get). The class definitions just varied from one country to the next, which was a massive pain for producers wanting to sell internationally - so the idea was that every EU country would agree on a common set of classes, making things simpler for everyone involved.
GDPR is not about stopping the spread of free information. its about personal data. You are completely mis-characterising the nature of the GDPR legislation.
Regulators are not enemies. Regulators are the enemies of established companies, and operate in favour of civil society as civil servants: they are subject to oversight, and are imposed to create oversight over entities who are not equilibriating in favour of wider society. They are anti monopolist.
Your response is really strange in this regard. Freedom of information is not an absolute. You have a right to privacy as an individual. If you hold certain digital assets like domain names, you are losing some of that privacy to have a WHOIS record, and GDPR is restoring some of it. If you browse web pages and entities hold onto your cookies and create value by integrating over sets of cookies at different websites GDPR is returning to you, the individual, some control over that.
That sort of democratic heroism is far from certain. "Regulators" and legislation are just as likely (or perhaps more) to be captured by and/or favor large incumbents as to combat them. By its very nature regulation favors established companies, who can afford better to pay for the burden.
And yet, the result of our regulatory system has been net positive to an extreme degree - you argument is trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. The very nature of political development in the western world has, for the last few centuries, been as much about how to put the "right" people and systems in positions of power. Let's continue to focus on that instead of giving up.
To use an analogy: if you love to travel the world but keep getting sick from preventable infectious diseases, the solution is to buy bottled water, mosquito repellent, and vaccinations, not stop traveling all together.
> You must have a really short memory to say that "regulators are not enemies". Just look at any history book, tell me what you find.
A bumpy ride from early agriculture, where people died of sickness and war all the time, to the relatively stable modern era of great wonders we all take for granted - hot water, long-lasting food of greater variety than even kings had just a hundred years ago, of powerful medicine and safe surgeries, of wash machines and air travel and the Internet.
All of that built on accumulation of knowledge and stabilization of societies, in which regulators always played a crucial role.
The history books do not paint the picture that "regulators are enemies". You just have to focus less on kings and wars, and more on how a society looked and lived in any given era, and why.
If I understand correctly, you only need to appoint a DPO in cases where you are either a public entity (you are not) or in cases where your site requires "regular and systematic monitoring of data subjects on a large scale", or in a couple of other special cases where you process extremely sensitive data.
Presumably you aren't doing that on "your" forum/webpage, so you don't need to appoint a DPO.
I think you are making a bit of a storm in a teacup here.
Is it Article 13.1.a we are talking about here? It says
> the identity and the contact details of the controller and, where applicable, of the controller’s representative;
See, the main question here is which identity it is that must be disclosed. The definition in article 4.7 has this to say:
> ‘controller’ means the natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body which, alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data; where the purposes and means of such processing are determined by Union or Member State law, the controller or the specific criteria for its nomination may be provided for by Union or Member State law;
What exactly falls under "other body" may be important here. What it does not say is that it must be a legal person.
Let us say that you have a forum on omgweirdfetishes.eu. You may say that the controller is The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum. Now it may be arguable that in itself counts as "other body", but generally there's the concept of "Unincorporated Association" which is just any group of people with a common purpose, it would be hard to argue that that doesn't fall under the "other body". In some countries, e.g. Denmark, an unincorporated association is even recognized as a legal entity in its own right.
So say that "The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum is driven by The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum Association. The members of the The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum Association consists of the users of The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum", and then identify the data controller as "The OMG Weird Fetishes Forum Association, contact details: webmaster@omgweirdfetishes.eu"
if I have a forum I store the email of the users so they can recover the password. Same thing if I put up a simple newsletter to contact my users, I have their emails (newsletters may not be fashionable but they're much more effective than using a facebook page or other systems, since you own the email list of people who want to hear from you).
So, even in the boring world of small websites, you have to comply.
> if I put up a simple newsletter to contact my users, I have their emails
Okay, so then the only requirement of GDPR is that you must make the newsletter opt-in rather than opt-out and you must make the unsubscribe process as easy as the subscribe process.
This is indeed a problem if you run Mailman, which has a somewhat annoying unsubscribe process and which does not have the funding[1] to address this.
What I’ve read indicates that if you’re not targeting EU users (via ads or as customers), especially if you aren’t commercial, you don’t have to do anything. Is that not true?
This would only matter if you’re profiting from your fetish forum, which seems unlikely. Plus you’d need to have an EU presence, otherwise who cares and who would force you? There’s nothing stopping you from ignoring GDPR in the scenarios you describe. Being a small hobby forum pretty much let’s you pretend GDPR doesn’t exist, while being the likes or FaceBook makes it impossible to ignore.
The law is for everyone, it doesn't matter if I profit from it or how big I am, I still have to reveal who I am if I take data that is often needed, like emails in a forum.
Of course you won’t be impacted, but your protection is via selective enforcement. You won’t be in compliance with the law, but the government will lack the resources or determination to punish you. Until that changes.
This is fundamentally dangerous. Once we are all lawbreakers all the time, it creates a powerful tool for oppression and using the law to harass and silence political opponents.
It’s not that slippery slopes don’t exist, but when the only argument against something is the supposed harm that it may lead to via a slippery slope, it’s suspicious and unconvincing. This thread is full of people saying that this is a step on the road to tyranny, and may end there, that’s true, but the arguments don’t seem to really support the claims.
If this really matters to you, and you care about doing more than signaling to others of your ideological persuasion, you need to offer more and better. Slippery slope is too often the lazy fallacy, and not a real case against something. How does this law as written and likely enforced do all of the bad things claimed here?
This is not a slippery slope argument. Situation where the only thing protecting you from unreasonable law is selective enforcement is already bad, no further sliding down the slope needed.
It is enforced no matter where in the world you are, as long as your site is accessible to EU citizens. And you will be surprised by how much jurisdiction European courts can have. A monetary judgement can be collected from any American company via UFMJRA, for example (http://www.uniformlaws.org/ActSummary.aspx?title=Foreign%20M...).
We’re not talking about a company, we’re talking about a fetish forum without a scrap of money changing hands. Who is enforcing GDPR there exactly? EU paratroopers? Not to mention that most people don’t live in the EU or America, so again, who’s enforcing this on our hypothetical non-business?
It’s really hardcore levels of bullshit being employed in this thread to make a big scary mountain out of a molehill.
That doesn’t sound even remotely correct given the nature of the “offense” in this case, for which the remedy is a fine. Can you cite this “jail the moment you step into its territory” thing?
Jail is a place where you're put if there is a chance that you might try to run away from a trial and its resolution. I was in jail - and I did nothing, the case was immediately dropped.
Additionally, while the remedy for this crime is a fine, the remedy for not paying the fine is prison.
The cookie regs seem largely a moot effort given the pervasiveness of cookie usage, GDPR though I think is actually a generally good idea. The "nightmare scenario" that certain articles have detailed might be overburdening for companies, but in general having the right to be forgotten and know how your data is being distributed are large advancements in personal data rights.
This new reg to me is just bewildering however - not even allowing media sources to opt out of it? That just makes no sense to me and comes off as an attempt to destroy smaller / independent outlets. Hopefully it dies on the vine.
On something of a tangent I suspect that large parts of the GDPR will be comparably moot.
Many companies including Twillo and Delta have rolled out their tracking controls behind feature flags. If you decide that you'd rather not be tracked they make you stare at a spinner for ~100 seconds while your privacy settings are "being applied".
Keeping privacy as inconvenient as possible is big business.
> Keeping privacy as inconvenient as possible is big business.
To some extent, this risks running afoul of GDPR and getting hit with a big fine. But no doubt companies will try to find the sweet spot of being as annoying as possible while still being technically compliant.
"The information was on display on Alpha Centauri for at least 20 years".
I.e. if they make a GDPR request put them on the waiting line with rest of customers. Press 1 for account related matter, Press 2 for account information, please enter your account number. Please enter your account number to confirm. Press 3 for privacy related information. Press 4 for information regarding GDPR. Please enter account information. Please verify account number. Redirecting to customer support.
Please press 9 to continue. Please press 2 for verifying you are EU citizen. Enter verification data.
With this proposal they want to impede freedom of information while at the same time get some of that sweet tax money in the pockets of their allies.
This sounds plausible but do you have evidence that it is actually true?
An equally plausible reason for the proposed change is that European leaders see what media consolidation leads too. Too many people relying on too few sources for information. Perhaps this legislation is an ill thought out way to try to counteract the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica controversy.
Newspapers, and magazines are dying. They are no longer able to do the sort of investigative journalism like in the past. Consolidation has led to a degradation of quality and has caused too few people to control too much information. Witness the shenanigans of Sinclair Broadcasting recently.
I don't know the merits of the legislation in question but without evidence it's a hard sell to ascribe its passing to what you claim.
These kind of laws make it much more difficult to spread content and therefore they consolidate informations in few player, often loved by the governments and their puppeteers.
We used to be able to put a website online, gather emails to send newsletters, offer services to our users, etc without any help from the government. Now, every time I put a new website online I have to fill pages of pages with stupid policies and I know I'm not even fully compliant because honestly it's impossible to really be since it's all about how it's interpreted by the current bureaucrat. These kind of laws don't deserve a place in Europe.
You need people to be able to be naturally compliant, so that they can promote their stuff wihout being scared of persecution if they say something the government doesn't like. Today you don't make a website and say controversial stuff, otherwise you know that when the government will notice it will uses the broad interpretations that stupid laws like the cookie law or GPDR give them to drag you into court and destroy you.
By government of course I mean bureaucrats, political figures and your bigger competitors.
These kind of laws, like the GDPR, where they say "we will use them for good, don't worry, we will ony use them on big companies" are those that freedom-minded people should be mostly scared about.
Of course the proposal in OP is much worse and makes no sense.
That may be a consequence of such laws but do you have evidence that this is the consequence that the people making this law want? What evidence do you have for the motivations for the people making this law.
It's almost irrelevant whether the people proposing this law have good or bad intentions. The current establishment may mean well, but the road to hell us paved with good intentions. There is no guarantee that a regime in 30 years won't abuse these regulations.
What's stopping a regime to enact these regulations in 30 years, if it feels it needs them?
That argument works against things like data retention laws (the new regime may find 'new uses' for data already retained) but if anything, GDPR discourages data retention
My judgement is that US is also in a bad spot, but at least the first amendment give them a little more protection, and there is a much stronger stance on freedom of speech, and even more variety in opinions compared to Europe.
It was an actual question. Sometimes people who use the word are genuinely interested in the debate. Most of the time though, it's just some idiot who is interested in blaming everything that's bad with the world on some nefarious Other.
I'm guessing this is an unpopular idea but is it possible we just don't need as many journalists? I 100% Agree that journalism is important but before the internet, for the most post, every news paper needed people to cover every story they wanted to run. Even if they took a story from the AP or Ruters they still needed someone to dig that up. Now, there is no reason why the AP and Rutere can't just publish their content themselves to the entire world. Similaly a local newspaper doesn't need to pay someone to cover the world news. We don't need every major news paper from every country to have reporters in every other country as they can just use someone else's reporting.
I'm guessing your first thought to that is we need multiple voices and points of view and I don't disagree. I'm just pointing out that in 1975 you probably had 2-5 reporters from Sweden in NYC, 5-15 from Germany, 5-15 from France, 4-7 from Italy, 2-3 from Spain, 5-15 from the UK, 3-4 from Ireland etc etc. Add up all the major countries and their might have been 400+ NYC foreign correspondents. Do we need all 400 or has the internet made it so we only need 10-20? Apply that concept everywhere, even to local papers and it seems like the biggest hit to journalism isn't Google, it's the internet itself. Just like a few wheat harvesting machine replace hundreds of workers the world has changed to one where far less journalists can do the work of what used to take many more?
I know I'm a day late, but thought I would provide my perspective.
I think there's two aspects to this, is journalism sustainable and is journalism worthwhile. I think publishers are having a hard time with the former, but I think undeniably it is valuable in the latter. As the world becomes more complex and bad actors are becoming more sophisticated, I think the world needs more journalists to uncover truth and reality, especially since there is profit to be made from writing fake news. I think the fact that it's not sustainable now means that we should move to a model where we subsidize news with public funding; not sure what the best structure is, but there is so much good public externalities to journalism that it's worthwhile to fund it with public money.
The article mentions Spain, but Germany had a similar initiative, sometimes called the "Google tax": Allow newspapers to charge for snippets. Newspapers did because after lots of lobbying it would look bad if they didn't. Google News delisted all that charged money. Shortly after the large newspapers allowed Google to use snippets without payment. So small websites (search engines) lost while those delivering substantial traffic (monopolies like Google) still strive.
> The article mentions Spain, but Germany had a similar initiative
There’d be little point in making the post longer by mentioning Germany inline as well. The shorter and more digestible the post is, the more likely people will read and share. Germany’s case is mentioned in the post they link to when referencing Spain’s situation[1].
The news industry is already in trouble. This seems like it could backfire in a way that news services might automatically be de-listed from many services and simply lose ALL of their traffic. Seems like it's meant to save them but could sink them by accident.
This has been done in the past, and publishers always cave after seeing a massive drop in traffic. This new law makes it so that they can't allow Google to use their snippets for free even if they wanted to.
What they really need is for sites to stop ripping off their stories. How often do you see an article that is essentially a reprint of a story written somewhere else. It's not really a reprint, it's written as an alleged summary of the other story but contains all the details and some irrelevant banter by the author. This stuff is all over the internet and prevents readers from needing to read the original source.
The internet is sorta like the printing-press but more important. Of course it's threatening the powers-that-be & of course they're gonna' try and get that under control.
The idea that the powers-that-be are working on getting this new Internet thing under their control has been a recurring meme for a long time. I'm sure it was around in the 1990s. They don't seem to have been doing a good job so far; unless they are somehow secretly behind Google and Facebook.
> "...I'm sure it was around in the 1990s. They don't seem to have been doing a good job so far"
Totally agree except RE: the last year or so. If you look closely "they" appear to be wising-up.
The CLOUD act (at least how I'm reading it) says that the American internet is American...in other words, "If we wanna subpoena your s#!t in Thailand, we can cuz your cloud-provider is probably based in Seattle, WA, USA."
Law is ultimately about precedent, and there is now a precedent for America to get a warrant allowing them to see any American company's consumer-data, regardless of where that data is geographically.
Well, let's suppose the legislation is voted into law.
Every news outlet with a grain of reason offers every major search engine or news aggregator, or maybe a whole self-publishing platform like Twitter a blanket deal: €20 per month for unlimited use of blurbs and links, as long as blurbs are short and are actual quotations.
So, the market would have fended off the attack on the way it operates, and ready to continue as usual.
The losers would be the non-commercial sites. Wikipedia would have hard time showing you all these Creative Commons-licensed pictures. Free (as in beer) publications would see large drops in traffic, not being able to offer their content legally for free, or re-licence it (it's often quite involved).
I think that large papers could ask, say, 1000 or something, to avoid being ridiculed, but no public news source in their sane mind would turn this fee into a profit center. They'd have much more to lose if their traffic slumps.
The underlaying question in this law is about estimating the monetary value of a piece of information and creating a market for selling information. As an example, here in Spain the master of Madrid Community's mayor has been deeply investigated, here that information has strong political implications, and produces monetary value for some political parties. A law can't be easily applied to Giants and ants, to huge actors and to individual bloggers, the model can't scale appropiately. So I would suggest just to impose a tax to huge actors and forget about creating a law that ranges from bloggers to google or twitter, those entities can't be measured with the same rule.
Googling about how to quantify in dollar the value of journalism, I found
I generally have a favorable opinion of Europe but this copyright law proposal, and the stupid "right to be forgotten" nonsense, shows that they are far from perfect.
If Kryder's Law holds, then by 2030 local hard drives will store petabytes (4x library of congress or 500 mp4 years). 32 terabyte thumb drives will cost $10. Routes around ISP's will be plentiful. How can copyright survive?
Storage costs aren't really stopping people gathering and sharing content right now. A 4 terabyte drive is about $100. Few people have them though, and fewer still have them set up to share content openly. Why would bigger disks or cheaper thumbdrives change that?
Because it’s a huge “if” and assumes that by 2030 the A/V standard won’t grow as well? I hope you’re right, but past performed is not a guarantee of future gains.
>but past performed is not a guarantee of future gains
Yes, but to your question regarding A/V standards, that works both ways. While past performance often isn't a great predictor, human biological specs are a decent predictor for the near future. If we take 8k as the current bleeding edge (given actual beyond-the-lab 8k screens exist, albeit at horrendous bleeding edge pricing), we're somewhere around one more doubling (quadrupling of pixels) away from the point where the number of image elements will literally exceed the number of retina in a human eye. Now yeah, the human eye jitters around a fair amount, and maybe there'd be some value in peripheral vision coverage too in theory, but even taking all of that into consideration to be very conservative we're still rapidly approaching the point where our display tech can exceed the limits of human visual acuity, at which point it's reasonable to predict that we will in fact be "done" when it comes to A/V standards (post-human seems farther away then 2030). And even that is getting into heavily diminishing returns territory.
It really does make for something interesting to think about, similar to that of audio where we've already been "done" for a long time now. We've lived in an era where a significant amount of innovation and money flowing around and such came out of a lot of work to ever more closely match our synthetic light outputs to the input capabilities of our vision systems. But that's not a forever thing, our vision system is such a powerful part of our senses that it's been a very hard target, but there is in fact a hard physical limit there. When it's reached, and there will be no more video format changes ever again, and no more screen changes ever again, no more chances to sell "remastered" and "updated" versions of older visual products, etc., it may make for some real changes in the industry.
And to GP's point, the theoretical limits of information storage in matter do seem to be a lot farther beyond the theoretical end of information requirements necessary to match a human's AV. Optimistically for all parties though, the music scene seems to have done alright through that transition so far, on both the production/industry and consumer side (where we enjoy near universal DRM free high quality competition). Granted, that was after a lot of very ugly thrashing...
You’re thinking in terms of one big screen, but by 2030 maybe it’s VR that rules the day? What does 16K per eyeball look like? How about a movie with a dozen perspectives in the file? There are loads of foreseeable ways to blow up file sizes in a dozen years.
360 degree video already exists: I believe it works by transmitting the entire output from 2 or more wide angle lenses and letting the viewer select an angle to display. Search for 360 video on youtube for examples.
c3o (Christopher Clay), who works in the EU Parliament according to his profile, posted several informative comments including one explaining the backstory behind the proposed legislation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16812099
> The back story of the law may shed some light.
> First, it's no secret that the intent is to prop up the business model of struggling publishers by getting internet platforms to pay them for spreading (links to/tiny snippets of) their content.
> After a "link tax" law was introduced in Germany, some publishers decided to waive it. Google reacted by removing snippets from those who didn't in Google News, making their links less likely to be clicked on. Afraid of losing traffic, these publishers then granted Google a free license.
> The government of Spain looked at this result and decided to implement the idea as an inalienable right, to make sure some publishers couldn't opt out, and Google would have to pay up. In response, Google shut down Google News altogether in Spain.
> This is the version that the Parliament's chief negotiator now wants the EU to implement. He believes that Google (and Facebook and Twitter, which have been added as targets) wouldn't dare shut down a service across all of Europe.