[merijnv]

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hacker News would technically be affected by the same Link tax. It would probably not be enforced but still.

The "link tax" isn't a tax on actual links. That name is a misnomer, it applies to links that reproduce key parts of the linked content inline.

So, for example, Google News links duplicating the headline and providing a summary. Because, in essence, Google News is copying content from news organisations/sites reducing their traffic (usually skimming headlines is enough to cherry-pick the few things you care about) while themselves profiting (keeping people on Google sites and around Google ads longer).

Whether this "link tax" is the right solution is debatable, but I hope we can agree that Google and Facebook abusing their dominant position this way isn't health for the world.

This does not apply to HN, because HN isn't reproducing any of the linked content inline.

[exodust]

> Google News links duplicating the headline and providing a summary.

What summary? I only see headlines on Google news. Where is the summary?

Often there's long headlines, but that's just writers trying to get good at SEO. Not that I mind long-ish descriptive headlines, but it's not content, it's still just link text, and an editorial choice to cram it with an entire paragraph.

[dalf]

What about RSS ? Many news sites have a RSS feed : * http://www.spiegel.de/schlagzeilen/tops/index.rss * https://www.lemonde.fr/rss/une.xml

So as an individual I can use them, but the dead Google Reader would have meet the same issue than Google News ?

[tannhaeuser]

The publisher can control how much content is exposed via RSS (typically just the lede), whereas with presenting scraped content by third party news aggregators, the user will never need to visit the origin site.

[Andrex]

The publisher can also control how much is shared with third party aggregators, either through robots.txt or a paywall method.

Which has been the case since search engines became a thing.

[tannhaeuser]

That isn't the same at all. A publisher cannot use robots.txt, and much less paywalls, to indicate a part of text that can be shared in syndication.

[Andrex]

A paywall can. The page displays the snippet the publication is allowing to be shared, while the paywall hides the rest. I believe this is what a few of the bigger US newspapers are doing right now.

[tannhaeuser]

Ok, but that would require regular readers to have credentials for the paywall. I understood the discussion to be about scraping publicly accessible sites.

[Spivak]

I think the issue depends on whether a service is acting as a principal or an agent. If a user signs up for your service and says "I would like to subscribe to Mox News" and you pull data on behalf of your user then I see no issue.

But in the same way you as an individual couldn't republish those copyrighted works, your aggregation service where you choose from sources and publish your links and summaries wouldn't be okay.

[Kiro]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill...

> The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a "link" or a "news story" and implies that an "excerpt" consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).

[thrower123]

So it is a quote tax. That's really not any less stupid.

Almost every thread on HN has somebody quote part of the article inline.

[Spivak]

The rules for when you are and aren't allowed to quote copyrighted material are long, boring, but fairly well established.

> Almost every thread on HN has somebody quote part of the article inline.

Which is very much a violation of copyright if it's pasted verbatim. However, those comments which quote line-by-line with responses and commentary is covered under fair use.

[Jaruzel]

What about Graph tags, or the tags that do the Twitter cards? I'm guessing that an aggregation site that just uses those, would be fine?

This can all be easily fixed with a robots.txt entry and specific bot name for the Google News bot, or a special noindex meta-tag just for news aggregators.

[mhomde]

Are you sure? I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure they won't argue that applies links without summaries as well. And what about thumbnails?

I mean the "fair use" laws weren't exactly clear cut either but seemed generally sane

[mike22223333]

Headlines are exempted from link tax. Any part of body text is not.

[Kiro]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/eus-link-tax-will-kill...

Do you have any source for that? According to the EFF even the pretty URL itself is enough:

> The Directive is extremely vague on what defines a "link" or a "news story" and implies that an "excerpt" consists of more than one single word from a news-story (many URLs contain more than a single word from the headline).

[jeffchien]

For my own edification, can you point me to where it exempts headlines?