![]() That’s probably just part of its negotiating strategy. In response, Google has threatened to pull out of Australia entirely. He concludes: “If this precedent were followed elsewhere it could make the web unworkable around the world.” This, indeed, is the danger here: if Australia and the EU go ahead with their plans, it is likely to become the norm globally, with serious consequences for the Internet as a whole. The ability to link freely - meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees - is fundamental to how the web operates, how it has flourished till present, and how it will continue to grow in decades to come. To my knowledge, there is no current example of legally requiring payments for links to other content. Requiring a charge for a link on the web blocks an important aspect of the value of web content. One of the people arguing against the idea is Tim Berners-Lee (pdf): In July last year, the Australian government released a draft of what is now dubbed the “ News Media Bargaining Code“. As Techdirt reported, Australia is bringing in what amounts to a tax on Google and Facebook for daring to send traffic to legacy news organizations - notably those of Rupert Murdoch. ![]() One worrying development in this area is that the idea has spread beyond the EU. The worsening situation over upload filters has obscured the other bad idea of the EU Copyright Directive: the so-called “ link tax“, which would require large Internet companies like Google to pay when they use even small amounts of news material. Even these tiny extracts could be subsequently blocked by upload filters, depending on the circumstances. The proposed limits here are 15 seconds of video or audio, 125K graphics, and 160 - yes, 160 - characters of text ( original in German). Now, it is framing the issue in terms of uses that aren’t “automatically” blocked by upload filters. ![]() A year ago, Germany was proposing ridiculously tight restrictions: 128-by-128 pixel images, and three-second videos. One of the key battles surrounding the EU Copyright Directive involves the threshold at which upload filters will block the use of copyright material in things like memes and mashups. ![]()
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