SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the unfairly-taxing-a-single-Zelda-character dept.
Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament representing Germany, writes about a EU study which finds that even publishers oppose the proposed "link tax" which is currently up for consideration by legislators. Interestingly, the report also finds that many journalists are afraid to cover the issue. Several publications declined to comment giving various reasons, including differences of view between the online editions and their parent publications. In other words, the subject is being silenced.
The report, a bit misleadingly entitled "Strengthening the Position of Press Publishers and Authors and Performers in the Copyright Directive" [warning for PDF], was commissioned by the European Parliament's Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the JURI committee. Specifically it reviews Article 11 and Articles 14-16 of the proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Julia Reda also notes that many of the MEPs are not in a position to find out about the report prior the vote. That puts them in a situation of making a less informed decision than is desirable.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @01:01AM
It sounds a lot like what Spain passed as law years ago. Biggest effect was that Google closed their News service for Spain, as the law said they must pay everyone. No exceptions.
Notice the last thing. If they paid, big business would get extra money claiming they are big and thus deserve most of the payments. They would get money from people "advertising" the newspapers. If there was no money to pass around, everyone was out of the aggregator, but small media was the worst hit as it was a big path to them. Even services that are not media get trashed, so big corps can push their equivalent ones or stomp personal sites.
And that is what happened, big media got a small hit, but managed to silence competition and put others into risky ground. Not their first plan, but outcome was acceptable for them. Of course they would had prefered if they could charge for people for saying "go read the news here" instead of them paying for that. Upside down world.
In Germany something like this took place, but IIRC it was optional and some companies dropped the money charges, or did after some time when the traffic suffered.
Now you see why European news companies don't want to talk: it's a retarded "pay to do a job instead of get paid", shows how dickish some of news corps are, it has bad examples of what will happen instead of all being "doubts & maybes", it destroys the facade of caring about news or even plain people, just more corps pushing their agendas (profit and power).
(Yes, TFA mentions all this... just giving my personal experience as reader of such media)