Comment on Canada says Google will pay $74 million annually to Canadian news industry under new online law

• breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Free linking is essential for the open web. You can link to anything at no cost. That’s especially important here too; no free linking, no Lemmy. Link taxes are hostile to that, and that’s exactly what this is. It might be good for journalism - though it’s probably just the big players that are going to seriously benefit - but it’s a bad precedent.

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  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    As I replied to the other commenter:

    If it were just a link then there wouldn’t be any problem. Users would follow the link to the publisher’s web site. I think the problem is that facebook et al scrape the content and show cards and summaries and then user’s don’t visit the publisher’s web site. They’re getting paid for their content, for being linked.

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• drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This law essentially gives special rights to corporate news websites. It allows them to have the benefits of being public source (indexing, sharing, previews, accessibility etc.) but they can choose not to bare the costs of public information. This shitty law should have been a copyright framework ammendment that applies to all IP but instead it’s a clear example of regulatory capture.

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  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    What do you mean they can choose not to bear the costs of public information?

    Every law ever created should have been better

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    • Zak@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      People opposed to a link tax are opposed to the concept, not the implementation.

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• kirklennon@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The World Wide Web is a web of links. Websites link to other websites. These publishers want to be paid when certain companies link to them. That’s an affront to a core functionality of the web.

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  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If it were just a link then there wouldn’t be any problem. Users would follow the link to the publisher’s web site. I think the problem is that facebook et al scrape the content and show cards and summaries and then user’s don’t visit the publisher’s web site. They’re getting paid for their content, for being linked.

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    • kirklennon@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s the BS line publishers have been trying to trick people with but that extra stuff such as the lede and photo are explicitly provided by the publisher to enable rich preview cards/links. They literally add extra code in the page for that exact purpose. View source on any of their articles and you’ll see Open Graph metadata tags, which were created by Facebook.

      They added code specifically so their links from Facebook would look better, and are now pretending like the rich preview cards are stealing their content.

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