If The European Commission (EC) has its way, website owners might need to check with a lawyer on every link they make, to make sure it is “safe” to link to or else they could be held liable if they happen to link to a page that has stolen content on that page, even if they had no idea if was stolen.
Julia Reda, a member of the European Parliament representing Germany, wrote in a blog post (http://tgcafe.it/1Hs1snJ) about a leaked report on copyright reform from the EC (you can read the entire document here http://tgcafe.it/1WNtHPh):
"According to a draft communication on copyright reform leaked yesterday (via IPKat http://tgcafe.it/1MvXPgT), the Commission is considering putting the simple act of linking to content under copyright protection. This idea flies in the face of both existing interpretation and spirit of the law as well as common sense. Each weblink would become a legal landmine and would allow press publishers to hold every single actor on the Internet liable."
The ramifications, should this 'draft' become the law, are huge as you can imagine.
Here's how +Boing Boing puts it http://tgcafe.it/1L7iSRu:
"Take Boing Boing: we’ve made something like one million links over the years. Even if we’d been able to pay lawyers to review every page we’d ever linked to, we’d also have to pay layers to continue to review all of those million pages regularly, to make sure that none of those pages had been updated with infringing material.
It’s a grotesque perversion of copyright, which gives creators the right to control who may copy and display their creations, expanding this right to encompass who may factually state the location of copies of those works."
Now... I personally found the 'leaked document' a bit too hard to follow/understand/digest, but I do agree with +Greg Sterling, who wrote in a post at +Marketing Land:
"I read the report, and I didn’t have quite the same reaction. However, as a European MP, she’s much closer to the discussion."
Here's again, the link to the document http://tgcafe.it/1WNtHPh; you can also find it embedded in the +Marketing Land post mentioned above.
So is there anything to be done about this?
Julia Reda concludes her post with this:
"The leaked text is not a law proposal, but just a summary of the Commission’s plans for next year. The plan is supposed to go public on the 9th of December. Affecting change in the now-known versions is nigh impossibly until then. But sometimes controversial proposals are leaked to test them – if there is no protest, the plan can be unworriedly pursued.
It is hence even more important to become active now! Tell the Commission that pursuing the introduction of ancillary copyright law means barking up the wrong tree – no matter whether it is introduced as a privilege, or a restriction to free linking is enacted.
_...Encourage them to make clear once and for all:
Stop breaking the Internet!"_
Thanks to +Jennifer Slegg for publishing about this on her blog this morning: http://tgcafe.it/1RJoGGo
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Julia Reda – Ancillary Copyright 2.0: The European Commission is preparing a frontal attack on the hyperlink The European Commission is preparing a frontal attack on the hyperlink, the basic building block of the Internet as we know it. This is based on an absurd idea that just won't die: Making search engines and news portals pay media companies for promoting their freely accessible articles. |
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