Australian Law Could Make Internet 'Unworkable', Says World Wide Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee (independent.co.uk) 242
Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee has said Australia's plan to make tech giants pay for journalism could render the internet as we know it "unworkable." From a report: The inventor of the World Wide Web claimed that proposed laws could disrupt the established order of the internet. "Specifically, I am concerned that that code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online," Berners-Lee told a Senate committee scrutinizing a bill that would create the New Media Bargaining Code. If the code is deployed globally, it could "make the web unworkable around the world," he said.
Information wants to be free. (Score:2)
And it will find a way. The law is irrelevant.
Companies need to figure this out and learn to work together with it, rather than against it.
Re:Information wants to be free. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. I'm not sure the law requires payment, it just enables content owners able to ask for it.
I'm sure they'll stop asking as soon as Google stops linking to them and they disappear off the Internet.
Re:Information wants to be free. (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. I'm not sure the law requires payment, it just enables content owners able to ask for it.
It also mandates arbitration to set a remuneration amount:
52ZX Final offer arbitration
(1) The panel is to make a determination under this subsection about the terms for resolving the remuneration issue that:
(a) is in accordance with subsections (7), (8) and (9) (final offer arbitration); and
(b) sets out a lump sum amount (the remuneration amount ) for remunerating the registered news business for the making available of the registered news business’ covered news content by the designated digital platform service for 2 years
Source: News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code [aph.gov.au]
Re:Information wants to be free. (Score:5, Insightful)
It occurs to me...that many countries and leaders around the world wouldn't actually mind if the web stopped working as we know it today...at least for the common folks.
Re:Information wants to be free. (Score:4, Insightful)
The next iteration will be far worse for authoritarian politicians. The internet is going dark, not in the sense that it's being turned off, but in the sense that you won't see what's going on anymore. We've experienced a short period of unprecedented access to information, but that is coming to an end. And it's not because of stupid laws like this one. The trend started with social media, as people felt the need to exclude again and not publish to the entire world like in Geocities days. It's going to be cliques all the way down from here on out.
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Re: Information wants to be free. (Score:4, Insightful)
But what copyright are we even talking about here? From what I understand, they want to be paid to be linked to them? That makes no sense at all. I've never heard of businesses asking to be paid to have customers sent to them.
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And that is the fundamental arrogance behind their demands.
Google caved. Facebook did exactly the right thing. Nobody should be trying to put limitations on hyperlinks. We've been down this road before and such action was always rejected as the danger to the web that it is.
Let's see how long the Murdoch's tame politicians last when Facebook stops sending customers to his media outlets.
Re: Information wants to be free. (Score:4, Informative)
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They are asking to be paid for the content supplied, like, for example iTunes or many other legal downloads.
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But what copyright are we even talking about here? From what I understand, they want to be paid to be linked to them? That makes no sense at all. I've never heard of businesses asking to be paid to have customers sent to them.
That is just how journalist phrase it. I don't know the details about the Australian law, the similar laws described as "paying to link" in multiple other countries have always meant: Pay to copy part of the articles into their own news feed. So no payment for links, just for excerpts, though that can still be a problem is short pieces of an article isn't fair use.
Re: Information wants to be free. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is currently a flaw in the proposed Australian law. In the Australian law as it currently stands you cannot even link to a new story without paying the originating news organization. I think that whoever wrote the law decided to overstep what the actual news organizations were wanting. It is my understanding that the reason the law was proposed in the first place is because sites like Google and Facebook weren't happy just linking to the news stories and instead would copy major sections of the stories so that viewers never had to visit the new organizations site to get the major points of the story (like other countries do as you stated above).
Hopefully by the time the law is actually passed this "flaw" can be amended out of the legislation.
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Information wants nothing. *People* want information for free. But unless there's something really compelling about the information you're trying to sell, people will mostly be just as happy to get the free information someone else is giving away.
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Suddenly there's a greater desire for information to be locked away and kept private. But no one really wants information to be free as in beer either, at least not when it comes to them getting paid for applying the information that they po
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It doesn't rely on different possible interpretations of what is mean by the word free, nor does it try create confusion through an anthropomorphization of something so nebulous as the idea of information itself.
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Re: Information wants to be free. (Score:3)
No, it is meant in the way of "the universe wants ...". Aka a colorful way of saying "laws of nature".
Information IS free. Regardless of what anyone wants.
It *literally* cannot be shown to exist without leaking it.
(The zero-knowledge proof is actually a logical fallacy, disguised as a law of induction simile. In reality, you did not give full proof but only partial proof, and leaked that part as a result. And if you repeat it, to grow confidence, that just means you leak it, bit by bit, until yes, the recip
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Re:Information wants to be free. (Score:5, Funny)
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized.
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You got that ri.. eh... I mean, surely... no wait, that doesn't - ERROR: OUT OF MEMORY
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Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized.
Yeah, it hates that.
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Cool, I assume you just give away your personal details so you can be marketed towards more effectively as information wants to be free, instead of fighting against it.
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Cool, I assume you just give away your personal details so you can be marketed towards more effectively as information wants to be free, instead of fighting against it.
Actually, sort of. If that means I get an advert about things I care about rather than something I don't then why not? If I MUST see ads, I'd prefer to learn about things I am interested in.
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Information wants to be free, however the production of valid information does cost money. The consequences of private sources of valid information not getting paid means turning over the production of valid information to organizations that can afford it, like governments. Totalitarians rely upon this everywhere.
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Does writing something like this make you feel good? Do you feel powerful and strong writing insults behind a keyboard that you would never dare say to someones face? Is this how you want to be perceived by others?
So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:2)
Re:So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought it was content redistribution in the form of embedding that is the current problem.
Sort of.
If a site puts a "summary" in their meta then google will show that summary instead of text scraped from the page. It's the reason that all those "dictionary" sites say "click here for the best definitions" instead of any useful info when you search for a word.
Short version: Site owners already have full control over what Google "redistributes", they're just choosing not to because they think google will give them free money instead. Which they won't.
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The alternative solution for Google is easy, is simply isn't good: whenever someone searches something, Google can display the URL and say "more content available in the link". No snippet, no summary, no photo, nothing, just a full, clickable URL.
Re: So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, Google's spider did not *take* anything by showing a snippet.
It literally asked the site's server "Can you send me a copy of the lisr what you have on offer for me, a robot, to download?", the server went "Sure thing, here's robots.txt.", and then Google went "Hey, can you send me a copy of that article page (that robots.txt said I can get)?".
And instead of the server going "Only if you agree to these conditions here ...", it went "Sure thing! Here is all the data, no strings attached!".
Those idiots simply haven't understood the most basic concepts of HTTP, and failed to configure their servers, and now they bitch like spoiled brats who always got everythign for free usually do.
Well boo hoo. Nobody cares. Learn a lesson, stop stealing from creators, grap the buggy whip, mount a horse buggy, light an oil lamp, and die in a fire, you utterly useless twats!
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I agree, my point is that if they legally want this, Google may go all the way and follow the letter of the law strictly. Check my other answer for how that could be done in an even more annoying way: https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
But notice one important aspect: copyright law doesn't care about technical methods, it cares only about who owns the copyright, and whether there's an explicit contractual grant of rights from the copyright owner to the distributor. If there isn't, the copyright owner failing
Re: So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:3)
Robots.txt is not a Google invention. Itâ(TM)s been a de facto standard since well before either Google or the DMCA were things. Surprisingly, itâ(TM)s only been taken up by IETF fairly recently, and should be become an official standard soonish. (For a technology standards bidy, IETF works annoyingly slowly.) But either way, itâ(TM)s not a Google invention; but an internationally accepted way of making the internet work.
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copyright law doesn't care about technical methods, it cares only about who owns the copyright,
You can't copyright URLs. Even in the AU. That's what this law is "fixing"
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Even more, the site has Opengraph tags that tells Google and/or Facebook exactly which text is relevant for the snippet and which featured photo to use.
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Yes, but the newspapers are arguing that the headline itself is copyrighted, that if you want to read it, you should read it in the newspaper. You know, as happened back in the time of newsstands, when you literally read the headline as printed in the paper itself, which in turn was hanging, or in a shelf. To continue with the metaphor, they are pretty okay with Google saying: "Oh? You want to know today's news about subject X? The nearest newsstand displaying it is there: URL". But they don't want Google i
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Re:So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:4, Informative)
I thought it was content redistribution in the form of embedding that is the current problem. How can you possibly charge anyone for a link? Has this guy lost touch with 'his creation'?
That's exactly what the AU law does.
It defines "news" as text having any one of six properties, including "
to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and opinions"
Seriously, you really should read it.
Here, I will willingly make myself a criminal by linking to the law text itself:
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliam... [aph.gov.au]
Search for the text:
" In designing the Code, policy makers have had to consider the fundamental question of what is news content. "
Any one of six qualifications, including "to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and opinions"
That means what we are doing right here. The content of the law at the link above is officially a source of "news" and they can charge Slashdot for having this link here.
Other key takeaway points:
"A diverse range of informative content about matters of import that can be defined by characteristics such as timeliness. ... Deliberately elastic, it extends beyond content produced by journalists. "
" The ACCC's final report adopted this more elastic definition, describing news as 'information and commentary on contemporary affairs that may or may not be produced and presented by journalists', "
So the government actually can charge money for the content of the law itself being linked to, purely because we are discussing it!
This has NOTHING to do with actual news, and everything to do with charging companies for linking to websites.
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It's a bad law but to be fair I think you misread that. For a start it's not the actual law, it's a summary and discussion of it. And it notes that in fact the definition you quoted is one given in an ACCC report used as a reference when drafting the law, not what the law itself defines news as.
If you scroll down a bit you find the following definition for "core news content":
[quote]- issues or events that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate and in informing democratic decisionâ'makin
Re:So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:5, Informative)
How can you possibly charge anyone for a link? Has this guy lost touch with 'his creation'?
Afraid not. As it is currently written, Google and Facebook will be required to make payments to news sites for merely linking to them [arstechnica.com], even if they don't embed any content or reuse snippets from the articles. Quite literally, a news organization could post a link to an article to their Facebook page and Facebook would be required to pay them for the privilege of serving a page containing that link. And to answer your first question, the law requires big sites to make a good faith effort to negotiate payments with news organizations, even if all they're doing is linking, and it forbids them from "discriminating" against news sites that ask for payment by only linking to organizations that are freely available. The law also addresses snippets and embeds, as you alluded to, but it's the linking part that is most controversial.
For my part, I find it to be quite appropriate that it's being referred to as a "link tax", and I think it's an absurd law that is fundamentally at odds with the principles of a functioning democracy (taxes like these are supposed to go on things you want to reduce, such as cigarette smoking or driving a gas guzzler, not on things that are necessary for an informed electorate).
As a direct result of the law, Facebook has already blocked all links to news [apnews.com] on their Australian version of the site (even international news, because linking to it would be "discriminatory" under the new law) and has blocked links to Australian news sources on all versions of the site (because they would arguably be required to pay). They're still allowing news organizations to repost the article itself to their Facebook pages, but the post won't contain any links back to the news site and other Facebook users can't share the news post in any way.
It hurts me to say this of a company I loathe so much, but Facebook is actually doing the right thing here. I don't think it's unreasonable to have discussions or draft laws about making payments for snippets or embedded content (though most efforts in that vein have been misguided and quickly fall apart when faced with market realities), but the very notion of a link tax is abhorrent, and that's exactly what at least part of this law is.
But that doesn't make any sense ... (Score:2)
Some may read your post and say "but that doesn't make any sense. That would be stupid."
It doesn't have to make sense - it's legislation.
It's written by a combination of old dudes with Jitterbug phones and young baristas who give customers the password to the shop's "Google".
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Politicians don't write legislation. In this case the ACCC - the consumer watchdog, an independent government body - wrote the legislation.
The ACCC has a long and respected history of looking out for Australian consumers. People who think this is the work of "Murdoch" or "Politicians" are so obviously misled. Any guesses who is doing the misleading? If you get your information from Google or Facebook,
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Taxes are mainly a way to raise revenue - so the government has some money to spend. Using them to influence behavior is really secondary.
Agreed, which is why I said "taxes like these", rather than just "taxes" in the parenthetical to which you're referring. I was hoping "like these" would make it clear that I was not making a generalization about taxes, but was rather speaking narrowly about a certain variety of tax that was at play.
Honestly, I'm not sure what you were expecting from a four paragraph post someone wrote off-the-cuff. I actually thought I was being rather circumspect by including those two words, simply because I was aware of
Re: So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:2)
What I donâ(TM)t get is why they (Both Google AND Facebook) donâ(TM)t just move whatever servers they have in Australia outside the country, tell them to go pound sand, and dare a âoewestern democracyâ to implement a communist-China-style âoeGreat Firewallâ. China may be able to put down the citizens who object and ignore international rights organizations and other governments. But what happens if Australiaâ(TM)s citizens are suddenly cut off from Google, Android, Faceboo
Re:So is the problem linking or embedding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for summarizing so well. What the law essentially does is make what in the old days we could call a "card catalog" in a library illegal. Or a bibliography for works cited.
It's never been illegal in print media for there to be an index of books and news articles. It's also long been considered fair use to quote a sentence or two from the article and then include a reference to it in the bibliography. In fact, it was considered a requirement for good authorship to provide citations for all your sources.
Before the days of the internet there were (manually) searchable indexes of articles by subject matter, which would then tell you which magazine or newspaper to get from microfilm to read the article. Publishers LOVED these indexes because it increased the readership of their publications, encouraging more libraries to maintain a back-issue catalog, and more people to read their material in general.
News publishers today are happy that there are search engines linking to them because that is where they get a huge portion of their readership, and virtually *ALL* of their new readers. They're just motivated by greed when they realize that the company indexing their data has a whole ton of money that they could siphon away if they just lobby hard enough.
Then they cry foul when the company simply decides to stop providing the service instead. i.e. they're saying 1) Google/Facebook/etc. are obligated to provide us with readers, and 2) They are obligated to pay for the privilege of having that obligation.
Imagine you're a guy named Mish. Your wife Ellen loves going out to eat with you and you eat a lot of good food. You start telling all your friends about a great restaurant to eat at and showing them a take-out menu you took home so they can see all the great food there. So many people trust your opinion on food that you decide to start a business listing the best restaurants and what you can eat there. You decide to sell your book called the "Mish-Ellen Guide".
The restaurants start gaining lots of customers by being listed in your guide. Then a bunch of restaurants are saying "Hey you are making money off of us by selling this guide, you need to pay us for the privilege of telling people about our food!". This is fucking stupid, but the restaurants are able to buy off the local politician to pass a law saying you have to pay restaurants for the honor of including them in your guide.
You say "Fine, I'll just stop publishing the guide. I'll just let random people publish their recipes in my books instead." Then the restaurants go ballistic when they stop getting the customers from your guide. They go back to the politician and try to get him a law mandating that you must publish your guide because it's your legal duty, and therefore you must pay the restaurants.
It's completely stupid but somehow brain cells go out the window when it involves "The Internet".
You can tax tobacco to death (Score:2)
But you can't force people to smoke.
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Geo Blocking (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Geo Blocking (Score:2)
So? Australia is not dependent on Google News service. Google News is dependent on local news publishers. Otherwise they'd be uploading summaries of random blogs or American "news".
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So? Australia is not dependent on Google News service. Google News is dependent on local news publishers.
Australia may not be dependent on Google News, but the Australian news industry likely is. In every other case where this sort of stuff has happened, the story has always been the same: Google stops linking to those news sites and those news sites come groveling back a few months later once they've seen their traffic fall off a cliff.
Google likely would've done the same here—linking to freely available sites while refusing to link to anything that required payment—except that they can't. Divisio [aph.gov.au]
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Since the block yesterday? Of course they saw increased traffic. They’re being talked about right now. That’s why I talked about a few months.
Grabs Popcorn (Score:2)
Can't wait to read the comments tomorrow to see Slashdot's rabbit hatred for Google and Facebook clash with their love for Tim Berners-Lee agreeing on a common topic against a law that hurts Google and Facebook the most.
I'm excited. I think I need a beer too.
Re: Grabs Popcorn (Score:2)
Don't lose your hare over it though. The beer will only ruint the last remains of your hair brain. P
You think journalism is being paid here? (Score:2)
No, sorry, it is only publishers. You know, that industry that lost its purpose with the Internet.
They may opt to pay journalists.
But usually they rather opt to like their pockets and produce more journatainment and auto-generated sports articles.
They are the main reason actual jouralism os almost dead.
Of course they want to be paid for getting something. That has been their business model since the first aheet music.
Corrections: (Score:2)
s/like/line/
s/ os / is /
s/aheet/sheet/
I do not see a problem if this is done right! (Score:3)
Then every search provider can decide to pay or not. If not they will skip the page. If they want to become a customer of said journalist/company providing content they can just setup a customer account.
Easy
But doing it with vague and badly structured law and taxing is nuts.
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First off, you don't know what rent-seeking is.
Second, Google is contributing value. They're laboriously finding and indexing data and providing it to people in response to their queries for it. This is tremendously valuable; there's so much information online that we must have tools of this sort. Indeed, Google itself is far from ideal, it's just that it's about the best thing we've got. I remember its predecessors, like AltaVista and Yahoo; Google's better than the former and more expansive than the lat
Unworkable (Score:3)
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thats a crock of shit (Score:2)
may hurt google and facebook but the internet is not free it cost real money to do news
News vs music (Score:2)
Charging for linking is wrong, but allowing charging for reuse of content is right. So the Oz government is 1/2 right.
Most people seem to accept that reuse of music needs to be paid for, so why not reuse of news ? Both require effort to create and so it is reasonable that there be compensation for reusing -- this is what copyright is all about. It should be OK to reuse snippets of news as you should be able to have small amounts of music or where it is incidental/background. What google/facebook have been d
Good for Facebook (Score:4)
I swore I'd never agree with or be on Facebook's "side", but I think this was a great move on their part. It has brought not just national attention within Australia to this ridiculous move by their government, but world-wide attention as well. The nuclear option was the right way to go - after all they are simply abiding by the letter of the law. They cannot discriminate and provide free news if they don't provide paid-for links, thus blocking all news links is the way to go.
On a technical note, this is probably the most absurd thing I've ever heard. It never ceases to amaze me what lawmakers and politicians can come with behind closed doors when they're frivolously writing down words as "good ideas" pop into their heads. I swear half of those people have a god complex. When anyone links to your content they are providing FREE advertising. They are saying "Hey! Look at this! Open it so this website can show you advertisements or get you to subscribe to them!". Facebook needs to keep this pressure up long enough that the news organizations in Australia are hurt enough to not let their lawmakers forget it.
Content monetization makes it unworkable (Score:2)
Everybody and their mother wants to be able to charge people for accessing anything they create. Average people see musicians and Hollywood types making money every time someone access their content not just at the moment of its creation and they all want to be able to do that. Who wouldn't want to be making money decades after writing something or acting in a movie? Trouble is that it's become an addiction. So-called journalists want it too and they don't like someone like Facebook mooching off of thei
What's the downside? (Score:2)
make the internet suck to mask the NBN suckiness. (Score:2)
It's all part of a cunning plan by NBN co. If a whole bunch of content goes away from the Australian internet, it won't be so obvious how spectacularly shit the NBN itself is.
Might be a good thing. (Score:2)
The internet is currently broken. So maybe it's good that something comes along and forces us to remake it into a much better form.
Re:Not about linking (Score:5, Insightful)
Payment is not required for linking but for use of copyrighted material.
Facebook disagrees and they only ever published the title and 1-2 sentences which is never in any stretch of the definition considered a copyright violation. Google has also won multiple legal challenges in multiple jurisdictions to how much content publish with the link, so the courts agree that they too are not actually breaching copyright.
Make no mistake. This was a law that put a price on linking designed precisely because copyright law was found in favour of Google et al.
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> Facebook disagrees and they only ever published the title and 1-2 sentences which is never in any stretch of the definition considered a copyright violation.
It most certainly is. That's why smaller news-aggregation blogs like CFP or Drudge rewrite the headlines or just plain editorialize about the content. Google has enough money and lawyers to do it anyway.
Our society ought not be this way, but US judges side with corporate interests.
Oz may be entirely different; dunno.
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AFAIK, the content displayed is what is provided in the page's metadata, metadata used for exactly this purpose!
For sites/pages to have additional information displayed in search results, metadata has to be explicitly added & structured for that purpose.
It's the same content that I grab through my RSS reader.
This law makes absolutely no sense and is nothing but a bare faced money grab by the traditional news media who are struggling to update their business models for the digital age. I'm sympathetic, b
Re:Not about linking (Score:5, Informative)
" I am concerned that that code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online"
That concern is unfounded. Payment is not required for linking but for use of copyrighted material.
Incorrect.
From the actual text of the bill (emphasis mine):
52B Making content available
(1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:
(a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise placed on the service; or
(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or
(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service.
(2) Subsection (1) does not limit, for the purposes of this Part, the ways in which a service makes content available.
52C Interacting with content
(1) For the purposes of this Part, a user of a service interacts with content made available by the service if:
(a) the content is reproduced on the service, or is otherwise placed on the service, and the user interacts with the content; or
(b) a link to the content is provided on the service and the user interacts with the link; or
(c) an extract of the content is provided on the service and the user interacts with the extract.
(2) Subsection (1) does not limit, for the purposes of this Part, the ways in which a user of a service interacts with content made available by a service.
Source: News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code [aph.gov.au]
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I suspect only the news orgs will want to post links to this content.
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I think the balance of profit should shift away from scrapers (like google) to producers (like news outfits that hire investigative reporters) but there it is... no linking. Thumbs down.
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Then don't link to content unless it is explicitly allowed without remuneration. One could sign a cryptographic hash of a URL with the private key from a certificate for the domain and put the result in a "free linking permitted" HTTP header, so that anyone who links to the page can prove that permission to link has been granted. The web will survive, paywalled websites probably not.
Re:Not about linking (Score:4, Insightful)
Then don't link to content unless it is explicitly allowed without remuneration.
No can do because the bill is a step ahead of you. They already thought of that loophole and added a provision to cover it.
I'm not going to quote it here because it's rather lengthy and dense, but check Division 5 of the bill [aph.gov.au] and you'll see where it deals with what you're talking about. In short, Google and Facebook are explicitly forbidden from differentiating between sources that require payment and those that don't, so they are incapable of only serving up links from freely available sources. That's why Facebook took the step of blocking ALL links to news on their Australian site this week (as well as all links to Australian news sources from the rest of their sites around the world); the game is rigged, so the only winning move is to not play.
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Oh well, then all Australian news businesses are fucked. Don't link at all. Anyone who wants to be heard can publish directly on Google and Facebook. Or you could only link to a page of your own which has the description and the link to the news business, and then charge for access to that page what showing that link costs you.
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We'll see how it plays out. Facebook is blocking everything, but Google apparently inked one deal already with a news organization, so who knows?
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Then don't link to content unless it is explicitly allowed without remuneration.
That would be a crime under the bill, far worse than just not paying.
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Doesn't Google respect a robots.txt file? If so, can't the news services simply include one that covers their whole site and avoid unwanted links altogether?
Yes, Google respects the robots.txt file, and the news services can include one that covers their whole site, thus telling Google not to show links to them. However, that doesn't solve the problem. The news sites want to be linked to, and they also want money from Google. This bill gives them both, thus solving the problem.
Re: Not about linking (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't "take" fuck-all.
The publisher servers literally give it to them, no strings attached.
They could easily have a HTTP auth or HTTP error code that means "agree to those rules first!" or "show that you paid, first!".
They WANTED Google to get that data. The HTTP servers didn't magically configure themselves to offer that data freely by themselves, you know?
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52B Making content available ... ...
(1) For the purposes of this Part, a service makes content available if:
(b) a link to the content is provided on the service; or
So yeah, payment is required for making it available, and linking is making it available.
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This.
It baffles me why companies that bitch about being linked to without compensation don't understand this.
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The title of copyrighted content is not itself copyrightable. It can be trademarked, but the mere act of referring to a trademark while acknowledging the source and especially if it is in the context of directing someone to that source is nominative use, and is not actionable as any kind of intellectual property infringement.
Also, in most jurisdictions that have a concept of fair use (which Australia does) snippets of copyrighted content that do not comprise a useful portion of the copyrighted work easi
Re:WWW (Score:4, Insightful)
The Internet was doomed as soon as people were allowed on it. And ruined as soon as the first Usenet poster tried to make a quick buck. We used to mercilessly mock cheesy animated MySpace home pages, but now we realize that millions of people creating their own content online just to express themselves without an expectation of personal gain was a golden era. And probably not a time we will ever return to.
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"And ruined as soon as the first Usenet poster tried to make a quick buck"
How dare you be so mean to Dave Rhodes... he was just trying to help :-)
(Note: only the very oldest of Net users will get this reference)
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TL;DR
I think Douglas Adams summarized it best in this sentence:
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
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The inventor of the World Wide Web claimed that proposed laws could disrupt the established order of the internet
The internet stopped being whatever ideal you're imagining sometime between 2005-2010
Exactly. I don't know what the solution is but Google isn't a search engine and Facebook isn't a social media site. They are both advertising companies selling people stuff. And they filter the content to perform that function most efficiently. If they have to block links to news sites they will simply block links to news sites. It may hurt their business, but probably not much in the long run as long as they hold their monopolies.
Re: WWW (Score:2)
Luckily, his and my Internet doesn't give two shits abpit what you and you degenerated degenerated your Internet to.
So have fun with your websockets and 100MB webappsites and blinking and swiping and rotating craptacle.
Browsers need to die
Re: The established order needs to be disrupted (Score:3)
Aren't tech companies styling themselves as 'disruptors' in the industry? Why are they crying foul if the government creates a rule to disrupt their current parasitic business model?
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Australia is welcome to make whatever laws they want, but I suspect it will
Re: The established order needs to be disrupted (Score:3)
To be fair, "ownership" of information is a concept with no basis in and no compatibility with reality. I agree with what you intended to express though.
Re: I submitted a different spin (Score:2)
Timing is important. You need to submit so it is the first submission on Firehose that people see when the most people are there. Otherwise it will just look like a duplicate to them, die to how Slashdot sorts these things.
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Facebook has a habit of going nuclear whenever they perceive the slightest threat. It's like they're really insecure about their core business or something....
I noticed that when I search an article on Google now I often get the (paywalled) original source as the second hit and a free to read copy as the first hit. But the first hit is some kind of mirror or wrapper around the original source, with a Google URL.
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The text of the law disagrees with you; "a link to the content is provided on the service" is explicitly called out as "making content available"
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The text of the bill does not differentiate between a link, an excerpt or wholesale reproduction (see my comment here [slashdot.org] for a citation). Facebook does not have much choice, they would be liable to pay if a user posted a news link.
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I guess Facebook could forward the Australian news publisher bill to each user who posts a link or quote.
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