Another EU legislative move... Think about how this would apply to hayabusa.org, I would have to pay for each link you post in ref to a news article, this could be construed a magazine, blog, website because they do not have clear delineations on what is what. Or I stop allowing links all together, along with the uploads..
I. Council: The member state governments
This Friday, the Bulgarian EU Council Presidency is (again) seeking to finalise the Council’s position.
would still force internet platforms to implement censorship machines – and makes a total mess out of the planned extra copyright for news sites by allowing each member state to implement it differently.
28 different link taxes
The German government is standing in the way of an agreement over which kinds of snippets of news content should fall under the “link tax” and thus become subject to a fee when shared: They insist that whether a snippet constitutes an original intellectual creation by its author or not should not be a criteria.
To appease them, the Presidency is proposing that every country should just decide for themselves. Sharing “insubstantial” parts of an article should remain free, but member states get to choose whether that means snippets that lack creativity, or snippets that have “no independent economic significance”, whatever length that may be – or both ().
Of course, this fundamentally contradicts the aim to create a Digital Single Market with common rules, which is right there in the title of the planned law. Instead of one Europe-wide law, we’d have 28, with the most extreme becoming the de-facto standard: To avoid being sued, international internet platforms would be motivated to comply with the strictest version implemented by any member state.
It also remains open whether simple links will be affected, because they almost always contain the title of the linked-to page, and it’s not obvious that an article’s title counts as “insubstantial”. Get ready for drawn-out court cases and years of legal uncertainty around hyperlinks if this version of the text becomes the law.
I. Council: The member state governments
This Friday, the Bulgarian EU Council Presidency is (again) seeking to finalise the Council’s position.
would still force internet platforms to implement censorship machines – and makes a total mess out of the planned extra copyright for news sites by allowing each member state to implement it differently.
28 different link taxes
The German government is standing in the way of an agreement over which kinds of snippets of news content should fall under the “link tax” and thus become subject to a fee when shared: They insist that whether a snippet constitutes an original intellectual creation by its author or not should not be a criteria.
To appease them, the Presidency is proposing that every country should just decide for themselves. Sharing “insubstantial” parts of an article should remain free, but member states get to choose whether that means snippets that lack creativity, or snippets that have “no independent economic significance”, whatever length that may be – or both ().
Of course, this fundamentally contradicts the aim to create a Digital Single Market with common rules, which is right there in the title of the planned law. Instead of one Europe-wide law, we’d have 28, with the most extreme becoming the de-facto standard: To avoid being sued, international internet platforms would be motivated to comply with the strictest version implemented by any member state.
It also remains open whether simple links will be affected, because they almost always contain the title of the linked-to page, and it’s not obvious that an article’s title counts as “insubstantial”. Get ready for drawn-out court cases and years of legal uncertainty around hyperlinks if this version of the text becomes the law.
