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TechDirt: As Canada Passes Corrupt Link Tax, Meta Says No More News Links In Canada
(www.techdirt.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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Meta said that to Australia too, but ultimately caved. We need to not let ourselves be frightened by the threats of corporations. They are meant to serve our society, not the other way around.
Sure. Except, if you read the article, this is about a fundamental discussion about paying to link to things. Should every post to Lemmy pay the website it links to?
There's nuance to be had. Lemmy.ca isn't Meta or Google. It's one or two guys running a server in a non-profit capacity. No one here is making profit, we're just folks sharing links related to our shared interests. That is not true for Meta or Google. Those guys are making money hand over fist. These are not the same situations and there is no reason we have to treat them the same legally.
there is no nuance. Bill C-18 want you to pay to link to something. It's a piece of legislation written by an industry that can't figure out how it can work and instead want to be subsidized.
Facebook and Google have the power to stop linking to them. Because that linking IS driving trafic it WILL have an effect.
Two guys running a server will be next. Don't you worry.
You're right. Nuance isn't even needed to see the problem here. Two corporations, mostly one when it comes to news, has cornered the web. For a huge chunk of the population, the web is Facebook or Instagram. For them the internet is Facebook. Linking inside Facebook doesn't work like it does on the open web, in many ways. One of which is that Facebook wants to link content but not have users actually follow those links. And so there's no point talking about linking as in the open web and any nuance around it. That's why the law differentiates this:
The rest of the web like the two guys running a server, can be dealt with via the existing copyright law in Canada which is fairly permissive.
We are talking about a bit of different things.
For Meta, or other big company that have data centres, when you received a link you "share" they can basically crawl entire page (cause the visual pop ups that ask you to subscribe or please turn off ad blocker won't work for bots.) They can have rotating instances so they are never under the 2 free articles per day limit. For lemmy as long as we don't pre-cache contents, we should be fine as pure links are driving traffic. But on facebook you can expand and read like almost entire articles or click the "read more, source" something like that.
Now back to protect these media company. It is sort of important to have a government funded, NPO run neutral media.(cause we still have a lot of older people that only read news paper and watch TVs.) The rest actually didn't matter that much. Everyone can have their own bias, but why normalize that bias through news media? Shouldn't be news just stay as news that reports facts(5W 1H) and leave those "opinions" to whatever other blogs or entirely different non-government funded companies?
So, why should the government protects/helps news agencies that their primary goal is profit and selling their eye ball time and whatever owner's political bias? Because it helps those that are currently in government?
Doesn't that "first they came for etc etc" totally apply then? This will definitely lead to news sites targeting smaller social medias then federated social media.
The law targets organizations with significant power imbalance against the news orgs.
That anecdote ends with "Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak for me." The state doing stuff is not inherently bad. The state doing stuff that weakens those who protest injustice, and disperses networks of resistance is. Huge megacorporations will never care about anyone but themselves, because that's what they're structurally set up to do. I wouldn't worry too much about this legislation yet.
Maybe. It depends on what's linked and how that affects the system. Linking isn't any different than downloading something which we know is ultimately copying information. There are nuances to copying in regards to copyright laws ethics, etc. And of course it wouldn't be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.
That you don't control other websites' functions or the ability to link is fundamental to the usefulness of the internet. Adding a web of microtransactions will result in a system controlled by a few with no inovation or open knowledge. If a site doesnt want to opely share data it should add security.
Facebook is not the open web.
Linking is very different from downloading or copying. A link is only a reference to the content, not the content itself. The news site retains full control over the content. If the news site wants to make more money from visitors, they can use ads or paywalls.
What if an instance is getting enough donations to be considered profitable? Drawing the line at profitability just punishes success and efficiency.
BTW a lot of posts in c/canada have snippets copied from the linked articles. How is this any different from FB and google showing links and snippets?
It depends on the contents of the link. Is it a bare URL? Is it a text "click here"? Is it the title of the linked page? Is it a snippet of the linked page? You can quickly see how linking can incorporate copying depending on how it's done. As you acknowledge further down:
On the point of profitable instances:
When such a successful instance begins having a "significant bargaining power imbalance" (with news businesses), then it isn't and they'll become subject to the law and will have to negotiate payments.
I gave the bill a quick read.
I consider snippets copying, not linking, but let's agree to disagree on the terminology, because the bill covers anything from URLs to snippets anyway.
This is what the bill actually says, so we're small fish and get a free ride.
Exactly.