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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • This whole thing doesn’t make sense to me. If the issue is the preview that facebook/google show next to the links then it should already be covered by copyright law. If they want to charge for links without preview then that’s just plain wrong.

    The way it targets corporations with more bargaining power than the news industry is also weird. Why does bargaining power matter? Is it because the news industry intends to extract payments from everyone later and they want to give the big tech companies no incentive to come to the smaller players’ defense? Or is it written this way just to avoid naming facebook and google directly?


  • I gave the bill a quick read.

    It depends on the contents of the link. Is it a bare URL? Is it a text “click here”? Is it the title of the linked page? Is it a snippet of the linked page? You can quickly see how linking can incorporate copying depending on how it’s done.

    I consider snippets copying, not linking, but let’s agree to disagree on the terminology, because the bill covers anything from URLs to snippets anyway.

    significant bargaining power imbalance

    This is what the bill actually says, so we’re small fish and get a free ride.



  • Linking is very different from downloading or copying. A link is only a reference to the content, not the content itself. The news site retains full control over the content. If the news site wants to make more money from visitors, they can use ads or paywalls.

    And of course it wouldn’t be Lemmy, the app, paying. Maybe not even Lemmy, the instance owner, or the poster since neither of them are profiting from that linking.

    What if an instance is getting enough donations to be considered profitable? Drawing the line at profitability just punishes success and efficiency.

    BTW a lot of posts in c/canada have snippets copied from the linked articles. How is this any different from FB and google showing links and snippets?