EU Publishers Acknowledge Snippet Tax Concerns, But Say: 'It's OK, You Can Trust Us'
from the yeah,-sure dept
Techdirt has been following the ridiculous proposal to extend EU copyright even further to include tiny snippets from articles for years now. The idea has already been tried twice in the European Union, and failed dismally on both occasions. In Spain, a study showed the move there caused serious economic damage, especially to smaller companies; German publishers tacitly admitted the law was pointless when they granted Google a free license to use snippets from their titles. More recently, the European Commission’s own research confirmed that far from harming publishers, news aggregators have a positive impact on the industry’s advertising revenue. Despite the clear indications that a snippet tax is a terrible idea, some want to go even further, and make it apply to hyperlinks too. Writing in the French newspaper Le Monde back in December, large news agencies including Germany’s DPA and France’s AFP complained that sites:
offer internet users the work done by others, the news media, by freely publishing hypertext links to their stories. [?] Solutions must be found. [?] We strongly urge our governments, the European parliament and the commission to proceed with this directive.
Now EU publishers have weighed in on the snippet tax, formally known as Article 11 of the proposed Copyright Directive. Their latest position paper, embedded below, makes a confession:
We acknowledge that concerns have been raised that Article 11 as proposed by the Commission may have a negative effect on the legitimate personal non-commercial use of excerpts from press publications by a natural person by way of hyperlinking or sharing.
But there’s no reason to worry, they say, for the following reason:
However, we would like to emphasize that it is in publishers’ interest to make their products available as widely as possible, on as many platforms as possible and this is why publishers themselves encourage their readers to share articles and news on social media for free.
In other words: trust us, we won’t misuse a new right to forbid anyone from sharing even tiny snippets. Except, of course, copyright holders have repeatedly abused their intellectual monopoly to censor material, in precisely this way. EU publishers want this new right to block snippets to apply even to single words:
We therefore question the necessity of introducing in the new [EU] Presidency’s compromise text, a reduction of the scope of protection granted to press publishers to acts of reproduction and making available to the public performed by “service providers” and excluding “individual words or very short extracts of text”.
They also want to extend the scope of the snippet ban:
In our view it is essential that any commercial entity or organisation, regardless of their business model, including those currently licensed by press publishers, exclusively or collectively, continues to be within scope of protection. Typically these organisations can be aggregators, media monitoring and press clipping agencies, individual companies, or public institutions.
This isn’t just about making search engines pay for the privilege of using snippets of text: it would include every company, of whatever size, and every public body, however meritorious or altruistic its activities, that uses them. The new position paper is important because it makes clearer than ever before that the snippet tax is not about stopping a few big players like Google from indexing stories from publications. After all, that could be easily achieved by blocking the crawlers using the robot.txt file. Article 11 is about something much bigger. It is the latest expression of the publishing industry’s apparently infinite sense of entitlement — that it has a right to control even “individual words or very short extracts of text” used by “any commercial entity or organisation, regardless of their business model”, as the document puts it. The egotism of publishers is so monstrous that they don’t even care if achieving this insane level of control over the Internet goes against their own economic interests, as the evidence shows it will. Power, it seems, is more important than profits.
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Filed Under: aggregation, copyright, copyright directive, eu, link tax, publishers, snippet tax
Comments on “EU Publishers Acknowledge Snippet Tax Concerns, But Say: 'It's OK, You Can Trust Us'”
>However, we would like to emphasize that it is in publishers’ interest to make their products available as widely as possible
And a snippet tax will reduce that availability. As to trust in your intent, once you have new source of income you will expand to replace shrinking income elsewhere in your business
Meaning that if you link without snippet – only a title – the title could be declared a snippet.
Next…EU to introduce “headline tax” — titles of content are copyrighted content themselves.
“Power, it seems, is more important than profits”
Only more important than short term profits. They are playing the long game. Once they have established that it is their god given right to be paid for snippets you can bet they will will move onto whatever the next stage of regulatory capture is. In the mean time, they just grant a free license to anyone big enough they can’t bully and otherwise use it to sue (or at least settle with) small companies who can’t defend themselves..
Their actions betray their words
However, we would like to emphasize that it is in publishers’ interest to make their products available as widely as possible, on as many platforms as possible and this is why publishers themselves encourage their readers to share articles and news on social media for free.
And yet they are pushing for something that will drastically reduce that availability across platforms and services by demanding to be paid for the traffic they are being sent.
The funny thing is they’re half right, it is in their best interests to have their products available as widely as possible, but their problem is in their short-sighted greed they’re going about it entirely wrong, thinking only about the (non-existent) piles of money they’ll get once they can finally demand payment for being sent traffic, and completely ignoring the multiple past examples showing that that’s just not how it works.
At this point I’m pretty sure that the primary goal of this is to screw over the smaller publishers, with an extra payday a bonus, but not the main goal, as if they are actually trying to help themselves here, then their actions are colossally stupid and counter-productive.
Re: Their actions betray their words
Re: Re: Their actions betray their words
“This isn’t true. This is internet meme only, not grounded in reality.”
Why? Sorry, you have to do better here than “my bare assertion is better than your bare assertion”. Explain, in detail, why this is not a benefit to publishers.
“No author can reach the whole world”
Define “reach” in this context. There are several definitions, and your assertion is false under at least one of them.
“It’s surpricingly small area of the world that the author can properly provide reasonable service.”
Define “reasonable service”.
“It is illegal to distribute the product outside the area where the author is active”
False. It may be illegal to provide it to an area where neither the author nor an authorised distributor has given express permission for it to be distributed, but nothing says that the author has to personally be active there. The author may not even have to give express permission, depending on the type of work and area (for example, if you say you allow something to be distributed in France, you may actually be giving permission across the entire EU, depending on the type or product. So, a guy in Poland may be able to buy it even if you didn’t say it could be distributed there).
“Maintaining the product isn’t possible outside that area”
Absolute bull. The maintenance of the product and the area of distribution are two completely different things. It also, again, depends on your definition of “maintenance”, so you need to be more clear. If you’re talking ab out things like marketing and translation, these are rarely undertaken by the original author anyway.
“Copyright infringement lawsuits are usually coming from areas of the world where author has no way to provide reasonable service, since his reach does not extend to that area of the world.”
Then, surely he’d be better served extending his reach rather than suing people who have no way of paying him for a legal service even if they want to.
Your arguments are vague and lacking. Would you like to explain yourself better?
Re: Re: Re: Their actions betray their words
Re: Re: Re:2 Their actions betray their words
What the hell?
OK, I thought you were just unable to express exactly what you were talking about. I see now that you’re insane and don’t have anything worth talking about in the context of authors reaching their audience. Sorry to waste your time.
Are they trying to legislate themselves into extinction?
They know it failed several times, so they want to try it on a bigger scale. “The solution to the problem is more of the problem”, which is the insanity I thought the US had a monopoly on.
Re: Re:
The legal profession sees the writing on the wall: AI and automation making many jobs disappear over the next 20 years. This is an attempt to preserve if not create jobs in their own sector.
So hurry up and get your work published on the internet. Once the law is passed in the EU, proceed to sue every single publisher who dares to publish any of the words that appear in your work.
You don’t have to win the lawsuit. Simply responding to a few thousand individual lawsuits should be enough of a financial hit that the publishers will be back begging the EU to change the law, or they go bankrupt. Either result will be a win for the public.
"Trust us" translated into plain English.
F*ck you!
Re: "Trust us" translated into plain English.
More like “this shot will not harm you as long as you don’t get between us and our foot”.
Re: Re: "Trust us" translated into plain English.
"That’s not too hard, that’s what, a few feet of distance?"
"Oh, sorry, when we say ‘our foot’ we’re actually talking about something else, a particular object that we’ve placed on the other side of a number of businesses, a house or two, and an orphanage just for fun. Also we’re using a howitzer rather than a handgun so… duck?"
Flamebait
I’m missing something. How can a snippet be a single word, since a single word cannot provide a unique source? If it is an unusual word like “benzophosphenolhydride” which is coincidentally the subject of a news story, how can I prohibit the use of this snippet on e.g. my company pharmaceutical innovations blog? Is this a literary snippet law or can I still point to stories using non-linguistic syntax (hex addressing)? The concept of protecting “small excerpts” of single word size must logically be extended to other publications and media. For example, will musical snippets of single note size be protected?
Re: Re:
Short answer – they can’t, they just want to be able to claim control over the maximum amount of stuff so they can get Google et al to pay them money for nothing at every opportunity.
That’s ultimately what this is about – they’re failing to make money, other people are, so they want the money other people are getting without having to innovate for it. They just want the maximum leverage they can claim.
Now can we demand payment from “publishers” who quote us or what. This should work equally for everyone.
So, if I’m writing a blog post and I don’t want to pay the snippet tax, I might refer back to a source article by saying something like, “I found this information from a certain article on a certain website. I can’t actually mention which article or which website or I’d have to pay them a fee.”
How exactly is this supposed to benefit the publishers, again?
Re: Re:
Well clearly their stuff is just so valuable that people will be tripping over themselves in order to pay for the privilege of linking to them and/or providing snippets that could sent traffic their way.
You know, just like how it worked the last several times they’ve tried this stunt.
Re: Re: Re:
THIS TIME IT WILL WORK! pouts
Re: Re:
It won’t. Ms Rowling will sue them because “that-article-that-shall not be named from he-who-must-not-be-named” contains 2 copyrighted and possibly trademarked terms or all of its semantic iterations.
Parasites vs. Symbionts
As long as this is a “may charge” law, not a “must charge” one, the chance for all the smaller purveyors of news to gain the fullest benefits of free SEO upranking by Google, et al. is HUGE.
this all goes back to the original stupid rulings in the USA over what the entertainment industries wanted and felt entitled to have, ie, continuous right to screw customers while keeping control of who does what with media files, just like thay have had for the past 100 years and their unending fight to take control of the Internet! the EU are being equally as stupid and following in the bad footsteps of what started in the USA and is spreading worldwide, all because of the the continuous flow of ‘campaign contributions’ issued to corrupt politicians, judges and law enforcement!! stamp on these and the worlds will be able to advance in technology and ‘good for all’., leave things to carry on and the planet will become one that is completely run by the various entertainment industries, while being under full and total surveillance, 24/7. remember ‘Iron Hand’ in Jason Bourne? that isn’t a patch on what we already have or what’s coming!
Two butts
And they talk out of both of them.
Widely share their publications, except you will need a license for specific ‘words’. Which will no doubt be more expensive if you should ever want to use a short bit of text.
The farce is strong with that one.
This might not be a "publishing vs Google" fight....
I just had this crazy idea…
What is the simplest, most logical response that Google can take to this mess? Drop all EU publishers off their platform, of course. It’s no skin off their noses, after all and a perfect opportunity to improve their automatic translation services.
So what is the simple, reasonable response that a news publishing company can make in such a situation? Well, create an offshore shell company, somewhere well outside EU borders that they will “sell” their own news to so that Google can link to it!
From the news agency’s point of view, it’s a perfect opportunity to improve their standing in Google’s rankings and perhaps push the competition out of the market.
Thank the Lord the UK is leaving the EU before everyone has to pay 1cent per hyperlink clicked.
the EU is busy burning itself to the ground, Spain and Italy have expressed a desire to leave and are in the early stages of planning Brexit-style referendums. (referendii?).
The whole crapshoot is collapsing faster than my new years resolution to eat less junk food and go to the gym.
Re: Re:
If you think the UK isn’t capable of doing idiotic stuff like this on their own, and worse, you haven’t been paying attention to Tory policy.
I know it’s hard to keep track of with the “we honestly don’t know what we’re doing but somehow it’ll all be magically better even though we didn’t do any real research before triggering article 50, trust us!” approach to Brexit, but there is far worse coming from Westminster without the EU having to say a word.
Re: Re: Re:
I have yet to meet a Brexit supporter who has done any research at all on the subject. They usually repeat right wing tropes and that’s about it.
Meanwhile, the consequences of leaving are framed as “punishment,” but that’s just for us. Any EU citizen stupid enough to apply for UK citizenship having been married to a Brit for 20 years or more is apparently only experiencing consequences when they receive deportation orders, it’s not punishment or anything.
Ladies and gentlemen… Brexit. What a dumpster fire of utter stupidity and magical thinking!
Don’t worry, you can trust our greed.
When any government exclaims, “Trust us.” People just raise their arms in praise and trust and love and faith and.. yeah right!
This eu snippet tax has its far off sights fixed on the obliteration of the internet, sending it into oblivion.