European Union—www.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre/en/visual-identity, Public Domain; link
I’m reading more about this EU copyright directive that was voted in last month.
Without doing a full analysis, I can say that we won’t go after anyone who links to our publications.
We presently don’t care if you use a brief snippet of our content and link back to the rest. I can’t see our position changing on this.
We do care if you take entire chunks (e.g. the text of an entry on Autocade, since they’re only a paragraph long). In some cases we only have the rights to photos appearing on our own site so we may want those removed if they’ve been copied from us.
Over the years I’ve just contacted publishers and asked them politely. Only a tiny handful actually respond; quite a few sites are bot-driven with feedback forms that no one checks. They get DMCAed.
But I don’t have a problem with the systems that are in place today.
It seems the EU is going to wind up creating a segregated internet: one where Big Tech and large media corporations can afford to do everything and smaller publishers can’t. This is already happening, thanks to Google’s own actions with favouring mainstream media sources rather than the outlet that had the guts to break the news item. Big companies are flexing their muscles and lawmakers are bending over backwards to serve them ahead of their own citizens. (Incidentally, I can’t see the UK doing anything differently here post-Brexit.)
Smaller publications might band together and share among themselves by some sort of informal agreement.
So for us, when it comes to linking and excerpting, keep doing it. Unless something happens that forces me to change my mind, I’m all for the status quo ante in the EU.
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