EU passes the "link tax"

M76

M76

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In a not so unexpected, but controversial move the EU has voted in favor of copyright reform directive article 13, with 348 for and 274 against votes.

This means that link aggregate sites and basically any social media that allows its users to post external links will have to pay a fee to the original hoster of the linked articles. At least companies with an annual revenue bellow €10 million, and non-profits like wikipedia would be exempt.

How would this be enforced and what will the reaction of social media giants be, remains to be seen.
Some fear this could lead to the banning of links to sites from the EU.
 
Good luck enforcing that. No doubt another way for a greedy banking family to make more sheckels off their worker bees. Browsing internet from many Eu countries sucks already with the privacy warning bullshit on every site, now this will further kill it.
 
This will be interesting to watch.

Perhaps just block access from the EU to any offending website and see how long it takes for the people to violently overthrow the government.
 
Bawjaws said:
Honestly, if this was enough to make you vote for Brexit then you'd be a fucking idiot. Brexit is going to be fucking dreadful for the UK.
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I'm a nationalist who believes the smaller and closer the central government is to its citizens, the better. It's easier to lobby your government to oppose/change terrible laws such as this one.

That leaving the EU may be painful for the UK in itself reflects poorly on the EU project.
 
This will be stupid.
Lets see what chaos this causes and the subsequent rollback!

Also...Brexit is a clusterfuck. UK will be properfucked. Here in Ireland...we'll be kinda fucked for a bit but will recover far faster then the UK
 
Smashing Young Man said:
That leaving the EU may be painful for the UK in itself reflects poorly on the EU project.
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You could argue the exact opposite, actually - that being in the EU provides benefits (especially economic ones), and leaving the EU will therefore leave the UK at a considerable disadvantage. But I'm not looking to change your mind on this, and frankly the entire argument is so toxic that I simply can't be fucked with it.
 
Bawjaws said:
Honestly, if this was enough to make you vote for Brexit then you'd be a fucking idiot. Brexit is going to be fucking dreadful for the UK.
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Actually brexit was voted for because of much more trivial things than this. The people needed a scapegoat, and they gave them one. Even the politicians campaigning for brexit at the time didn't expect it to go trough. But it did, and realization started to slowly set in that they have to actually leave the EU.
Now they got no choice but to get on the sinking ship that they themselves sabotaged, or loose all possibility for a future in politics. Which one do you think they are going to choose? Hurt the UK both politically and economically, or hurt their career in politics?
 
M76 said:
Actually brexit was voted for because of much more trivial things than this. The people needed a scapegoat, and they gave them one. Even the politicians campaigning for brexit at the time didn't expect it to go trough. But it did, and realization started to slowly set in that they have to actually leave the EU.
Now they got no choice but to get on the sinking ship that they themselves sabotaged, or loose all possibility for a future in politics. Which one do you think they are going to choose? Hurt the UK both politically and economically, or hurt their career in politics?
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Jobs and no control over your immigration policy are trivial things?
 
Smashing Young Man said:
I'm a nationalist who believes the smaller and closer the central government is to its citizens, the better. It's easier to lobby your government to oppose/change terrible laws such as this one.

That leaving the EU may be painful for the UK in itself reflects poorly on the EU project.
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Lets not have the thread go off topic. FYI, the UK is able to opt in and out of the EU laws, we agreed that... It is just ignorant Brexiters that believe the EU has direct rule over us.

We also have full control over immigration. No idea why people think we don't. someone who was able to travel from the EU and work here is NOT an Immigrant, the amount of people that believe that "non UK" doctor they have just seen must be an immigrant is beyond my understanding... Immigrants are not allowed to work for starters.


ON TOPIC

That rule is f*cking stupid. Hey you! Me? Yea You, the one promoting my business for free, You owe me money! I owe you money for driving customers your way? Yes didn't you hear me! Ok, I'll just stop...
 
This is hilarious. It's like when Spain went after google news for basically the same thing, so google said fuck it and shut down google news in spain. Lo and behold, the local news outlets saw their traffic drop because google was no longer sending them traffic.
 
Sniper|3d-R| said:
I want to know how they will enforce this law.

More laws does not mean people will automatically follow. What they hell is wrong with politicians today?
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Oh it won't prevent anything ....... but it will allow the EU to employ a bunch of people to identify and fine people and frankly it will fund an EU tax collection agency that will grow as it profits.

Eventually they will try and enforce their law with other countries as well. Some will be strong enough to tell the EU to fuck off, some won't. The money grab will continue.


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I hope these companies suffer, I hope the country suffers, I hope they lose billions of dollars, I hope they are miserable and that life is terrible for all of them. Amen.
 
Dodge245 said:
That rule is f*cking stupid. Hey you! Me? Yea You, the one promoting my business for free, You owe me money! I owe you money for driving customers your way? Yes didn't you hear me! Ok, I'll just stop...
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Yeah, last time I was involved in a high traffic website with links, people paid us to get links, or at least wrote nice articles for us to publish that had links to their site. It makes no sense to pay someone to promote their business. There were some exceptions, where people didn't like it if we deep linked into their booking paths from a general article (airline searches are expensive, not worth it if people don't intend to book), and one provider got kind of upset when their article was released with the title Forget the Alamo, suggesting it wasn't worth a visit, and they got a lot of negative response... but they still wrote more positive articles for us in the future.
 
Think about how it would affect [H] if this site was forced to comply. Look close to home to appreciate just how shitty this law truly is.
 
Jagger100 said:
Jobs and no control over your immigration policy are trivial things?
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Their immigration policies are bad not because of the EU, but despite of it. Brexit just makes things worse, and it's not like suddenly everything gets better when it is done. It will get worse, much worse. Best case scenario it gets back to the same level in 10 years. It's popular to bash the EU, but there are a lot of pros to cooperation over competition. With cooperation everyone gets something out of it, with competition someone wins, and the rest hates them for it, so in reality nobody wins.

It's inevitable that if you have something that you don't want to share, others will try to take it away from you. That is why the only way to be civilized is trough globalization. As long as nationalism exists in the world people will kill other people over arbitrary "my country your country" shit.
 
M76 said:
Their immigration policies are bad not because of the EU, but despite of it. Brexit just makes things worse, and it's not like suddenly everything gets better when it is done. It will get worse, much worse. Best case scenario it gets back to the same level in 10 years. It's popular to bash the EU, but there are a lot of pros to cooperation over competition.
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Guess as a red blooded American patriot I dont feel, understand, or want to share in your sentiment of having unelected tyrants dictating my life through ivory tower despotism.
 
This doesn't make sense.

When you post a link, you are giving the originating site traffic.

The more traffic the originating site gets, the more money they make.

Why should you pay for giving them business?

This law is so boneheaded it hurts, and will probably just serve to run aggregation sites out of Europe to other places where they are not subject to EU jurisdiction.

Old people who don't understand the internet should recuse themselves from regulating it.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
This doesn't make sense.

When you post a link, you are giving the originating site traffic.

The more traffic the originating site gets, the more money they make.

Why should you pay for giving them business?

This law is so boneheaded it hurts, and will probably just serve to run aggregation sites out of Europe to other places where they are not subject to EU jurisdiction.

Old people who don't understand the internet should recuse themselves from regulating it.
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I doubt most of the representatives who voted for this are so ancient as to have no grasp of the technology (the internet itself is pretty damn old now). It is a case of bureaucrats who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground because they live in ivory tower bubbles.

The EU is a cancer on the West.
 
tangoseal said:
Guess as a red blooded American patriot I dont feel, understand, or want to share in your sentiment of having unelected tyrants dictating my life through ivory tower despotism.
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This argument is so wrong it is silly. It was essentially a lie made up by Brexit supporters, and for some reason people just keep believing it.

The details of EU lawmaking is complicated, but it really comes down to this:

There are two components to lawmaking in the EU. One is the European Parliament whose representatives are elected just like we elect other politicians. The other is the European Executive Commission, which is dominated by the elected governments of member states, so the only way they do not represent the will of the people, is if the national governments of the member states don't represent the people. Currently all EU member states have democratically elected governments.

Essentially, the government of each member state has the right to legislate what areas the European Executive Commission can propose laws on. Then these laws proposed by the EC don't become actual law unless passed in the European Parliament, an elected group of representatives from every country in Europe.

The EU is no more dictatorial, unelected, or unresponsive to the people than in the U.S. One could even make the argument that due to gross problems in our own electoral system their system is MORE free, MORE democratic and MORE representative of the people than ours. I include such things as:
  • Partisan Gerrymandering
  • The impact of money in politics
  • The outsized influence of small states in the senate due to an equal number of senators regardless of the size of the state
  • The outsized influence of small states in presidential elections due to the electoral college
  • Racial/political/wealth based voter disenfranchisement efforts
  • etc.

I would recommend reading up on the topic of how the EU is run in this excellent article on the London School of Economics Political Science department website.
 
its the commision that creates the laws afaik, the mep's just rubber stamp them. still dunno how companies are going to implement this, maybe better for them to do a geo block and ignore the eu altogether.
 
Smashing Young Man said:
I doubt most of the representatives who voted for this are so ancient as to have no grasp of the technology (the internet itself is pretty damn old now). It is a case of bureaucrats who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground because they live in ivory tower bubbles.

The EU is a cancer on the West.
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Disagree completely. The EU has had a TREMENDOUS positive impact on Europe. People just don't remember the bad old days before it and like to have someone to blame when not everything goes their way.

The EU is based on compromise. This is going to mean that you don't always get your way. In the grand scheme of things - however - having a unified market and continent wide cooperation WAY outweighs sometimes being outvoted by the other member states when you disagree about something.

History is rife with examples of how things go when we don't have cooperation in Europe :p
 
tangoseal said:
Another round of the unelected forcing the non votable dictates over the unrepresented.

England you had brexit but you blew it.
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Not just england.

Denmark voted no the first time around. but then they came back and had us revote it... modern democratize where you can just do a do-over until you get the results you want
 
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Just post a referrer to your own unincorpoerated pastebin site

or just have everyone agree to use bitly
 
Not a good idea.

This is a fundamental part of the internet. Sharing links to other sites. The WWW was designed for that. Why would you charge for someone else to bring you traffic? You WANT traffic. Charging others to bring it to your site is detrimental to that. I would just not link to your site. Eventually, your linked traffic would drop and you'd only have direct visits to your site...

If I were a large enough site, I'd just block traffic to the EU countries. Would I lose money? Who knows. I'm paying to give someone else traffic, but am I losing enough visibility and traffic myself if I block it? Who knows, that's on a site by site basis.

What are the positive outcomes of something like this?
 
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