Boing Boing: EU wants to require permission to make a link on the Web

The EU commission is trying to ambush us with an online ‘link tax’. Links are the basic building block of the Internet as we know it, help us stop this: SaveTheLink.org Article by Cory Doctorow for Boing Boing Digital commissioner Günther Oettinger (CDU – EPP) is joining with European Parliament president Martin Schulz (SPD – S&D) in pressing the European Commission to create a copyright interest in links, meaning that making a link to a Web-page that contains infringing material would expose you to liability for copyright infringement yourself.

The EU commission is trying to ambush us with an online ‘link tax’. Links are the basic building block of the Internet as we know it, help us stop this: SaveTheLink.org

Article by Cory Doctorow for Boing Boing

Digital commissioner Günther Oettinger (CDU – EPP) is joining with European Parliament president Martin Schulz (SPD – S&D) in pressing the European Commission to create a copyright interest in links, meaning that making a link to a Web-page that contains infringing material would expose you to liability for copyright infringement yourself.

This plan, documented in a leaked European Commission document, would effectively end Internet publishing as we understand it. 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.

The effort is a doomed attempt to give failing newspapers the right to sue search-engines over indexing their articles, something that has been a dismal failure is Spain and Germany.

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