Irish Newspapers Budge Slightly: Now Say Links Don't Require Payment, But Snippets...
from the keep-digging dept
Last year, we wrote about the insane position from the group Newspaper Licensing Ireland (NLI), which represents the major newspapers in Ireland, in demanding that a charity pay them for linking to newspaper stories. In the last few weeks that story has been getting more and more attention in Ireland, in part because a related, but different organization representing mostly the same Irish newspapers, National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI), made a submission to a government review of copyright arguing that linking is infringement if done on any kind of commercial site (so, yeah, they'd probably consider that link to their site infringement).NNI made a submission to the effect that our view of existing legislation is that the display and transmission of links does constitute an infringement of copyright and our existing copyright law should not be amended in the manner discussed in the Consultation Paper.Meanwhile, the lawyers representing the charity have noticed that NLI appears to have backtracked ever so slightly and are now saying that "links alone" are not infringement, but if you include any text, you've gone over the line. They've put up a new statement reading, in part:
For commercial use: NLI does not require a licence from any organisation which only displays or transmits links to newspaper content. A licence is required when there is other reproduction of the newspaper content, such as display of PDFs or text extracts.Of course, whether or not they consider reproducing that text as copyright infringement is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Filed Under: copyright, ireland, links, newspapers, snippets
Companies: national newspaper of ireland, newspaper licensing ireland, nli, nni
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Now that corporations are people it looks like they have also figured out how to commit suicide......
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But I am pretty sure that you are correct about them not wanting visitors. I picture an old farmer with a shotgun in one hand and the other waving as a fist above his head while he is screaming "Get off my lawn, son!". (How is that for an oxymoron?)
Somehow they are more interested in having control over how visitors enter their site, than having visitors. I would say, live or let die, but with the horrible french jurisprudence
( http://searchengineland.com/google-loses-french-lawsuit-over-google-suggest-32994
http://www.gislou nge.com/google-maps-loses-unfair-competition-lawsuit-in-france/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/ 2012/10/google-threatens-to-cut-french-media-out-of-news-search/ )
On the other hand, Ireland is the place Google pays taxes in EU:
http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/google-inc-goog-wont-win-tax-lawsuit-french-official-29312/
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The fact that the newspapers don't want a snippet of text used to entice you to clicking the link indicates their intent that they don't want anyone coming to nor reading their newspaper. So you should honor their wish.
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Text extracts
They can ask for licensing for PDF distribution or wholesale reproduction of a story. But not "text fragments."
Unless they plan to start suing other print publications for quoting their articles, they will be forced to go back to the drawing board.
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Re: Text extracts
The wholesale production of a story with attribution though at first face subject to copyright/licensing is in actual reality dependant on the context classified as fair dealing/usage as long as there is no commercial gain from such usage and its in public interest.
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There is damn little that is there that is not somewhere else.
Why would anyone link to an article in an Irish paper about something that occurred elsewhere especially when the Irish paper lifted the article from elsewhere?
Which then becomes with this law why would anyone in their right mind link to an Irish or any EU web site as all the EU appears to be equally insane?
And they wonder why they have 20 to 40% unemployment.
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Linking to articles
With advertising revenue moving from the hard copy of the newspaper to the Blogosphere I understand the drowning newspaper will bring anyone linking down with them if allowed to do so.
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easy opt out of snippets
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