Julia Reda, the German Pirate Party MEP, is the most vocal opponent to the EU’s proposed neighbouring right: “neighbouring rights always have a broader scope than copyright, because they don’t have a threshold of originality. Whereas single words or very short sentences cannot be protected by copyright, they would fall within the scope of the neighbouring right.” She adds that “the proposed new right would make links to news articles subject to a fee, even if only the headline is repeated in the link. That’s a serious threat to freedom of information online.”
On September 14, 2016, the EU Commission tabled a directive proposing the worst copyright rules in the world. These include unprecedented new link tax powers for publishing giants. The EU is proposing to tax web links, Google, Twitter and Facebook would have to pay a fee to display the headline and preview snippets to online links. This is absolutely crazy.
The only organisations that want this tax are failing publishers who can’t cope in the digital age. The EU is once again showing its protectionist colours, effectively proposing a new digital tariff…
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