EU Politicians Try To Create A New ‘Link Tax’ To Protect Newspapers Who Don’t Like Sites Linking For Free
‘Bad ideas never die. Although there have been some recent minor steps in a positive direction concerning copyright in the EU, politicians have been trying to undermine them with really terrible ideas. We already covered the push to effectively outlaw outdoor photography, and now it appears that (despite already having this proposal voted down), some are pushing for a so-called “ancillary copyright” concept, better known as a snippet tax or a link tax.
The basic idea here is that newspapers that have failed to innovate want to blame third party aggregators (mainly Google News) for somehow “damaging” their business because they link to stories with snippets, and then send traffic to those newspaper websites. We’ve spent years talking about how it’s weird to complain about a giant site sending you traffic, but some old school publishers can’t seem to get past the fact that Google is big and successful while their own sites are not — and assume that means that Google somehow “stole” their revenue.
In response, they’ve pushed ridiculous proposals to require anyone who aggregates content with links back to the original to pay a weird fee, above and beyond the traffic that they’re sending.’
The post EU Politicians Try To Create A New ‘Link Tax’ To Protect Newspapers Who Don’t Like Sites Linking For Free appeared first on David Icke.
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