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0 pointsc3o7y ago0 comments

Another article of the same law (Article 11) would apply copyright also to shortest excerpts of news articles, anything longer than "individual words". (Colloquially known as the "link tax" provision.)

So even reproducing the full title of a news article would likely be an infringement, and then that becomes another thing platforms take liability for/need to filter under Article 13. Whether there's a link or not would be irrelevant.

(It's meant to allow EU news publishers to bill Google and the social networks for distributing snippets/link previews of their content.)

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Zak7y ago· 2 in thread

> It's meant to allow EU news publishers to bill Google and the social networks for distributing snippets/link previews of their content.

I see this as an unreasonable reduction of previously established fair use. The fact that most of the companies linking to news articles using snippets are American, like Google and Facebook, while many news publishers involved are EU-based hints at a geopolitical motivation rather than any fundamental change to the fairness of this sort of use.

c3oOP7y ago

You are absolutely right: The mere fact that these publishers don't block Google using robots.txt and that they in fact spend a lot of effort optimizing their metadata so that link previews show up just the way they want them to proves that it's at least mutually beneficial, and not an abuse of their intellectual property.

meh2frdf7y ago

Because google owns the index, if they don’t allow google to index they get no traffic. Google is a monopoly, there is no choice here, no market driving competition.

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