[throwaways885]

> Either google gets slapped and stops being a parasite that lives in the cracks of copyright law, or newscorp dies.

Seriously? Snippets are clearly fair use. The open web has operated on those principles for decades.

You're doing the same as those who cheered on software patents.

I don't care if Facebook and Google are the targets, ultimately this takes rights away from all of us and will undoubtedly spread out of Australia if it goes well.

Best thing that can happen is News Corp collapses and other countries stay away from legislating the internet.

[konjin]

>You're doing the same as those who cheered on software patents.

We have the GPL instead of trade secrets, we can actually see the code without signing away our firstborn.

I don't see a down side here.

[danShumway]

> We have the GPL instead of trade secrets

The GPL is not a software patent.

> I don't see a down side here.

Ignoring the fact that the GPL doesn't have anything to do with software patents, ignoring the fact that this analogy is wrong, let's pretend for a second that it does make sense.

If you went to someone like Stallman and asked him "you can have the GPL, or we can get rid of software copyright", he would not choose to keep the GPL. The GPL is a stopgap that we use to keep some software free in a world where software is not free by default.

But we currently like in a world where snippets are fair use. Taking your analogy at face value, you're talking about getting rid of our freedom so we could have a limited scenario where we can claw a little bit of it back? Some kind of snippet GPL?

So it still doesn't make any sense. Even those most charitable interpretation is still a bad trade for us to make.