Spain's Link Tax Taxes Journalist's Patience 113
rsmiller510 writes Spain's new tax on linking to Spanish newspaper articles is ill defined and short sighted and ends up protecting a dying industry, while undermining a vibrant one. In another case of disrupted industries turning to lawmakers to solve their problems, this one makes no sense at all, especially given the state of the Spanish economy and the fact that it comes 15 years too late to even matter. From the article: "While newspapers are at least partly correct to blame the Internet for their troubles, they should recognize that their own mismanagement also played a key role. Newspapers everywhere waited much too long to take the Internet seriously, and while virtually every surviving newspaper has a website now, they almost invariably treat those sites as a necessary evil, as something separate from the news collection and delivery that they do with print."
The "dying industry"... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is "professional journalism", and the "vibrant one" comprises bloggerss, press releases and Google Adwords, yes?
While Spain has offered a fucking awful solution to the problem, the problem of the destruction of journalism is an extremely serious one and we should worry about it far more than we worry about protecting the freedom to destroy it.
Re:A right to be remembered? (Score:1, Insightful)
The proper way is to use robots.txt on the pages or sites to be blocked.
Re:A right to be remembered? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have the impression that the newspapers that were pressing for this law don't realise that, despite what they may think, they really are not in a position of power, apropos the internet.
They want money. Indeed, if I was google my first step would be to de-index those companies, completely. What happens when your traffic drops by 90% and your physical circulation numbers start dropping?
The proper way to go is the same as TV, radio, and yes, your printed copy - sell advertising so that every time somebody hits your paper they see them. If you're 'good', put the advertising on the same server as the content so ad blockers have a harder time blocking them; making YOUR advertising a selling point. Just don't get so annoying with it that the ad-blockers engage in an active campaign.
Re:A right to be remembered? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they can pay google to list them.
Newspapers are one of the most annoying blockers (Score:5, Insightful)
About 15 years ago the term 'micro payment' showed up on the internet.
There where blog posts etc. proclaiming how the 'internet' will change if users, surfers, are able to purchase goods via micro payment solutions. The main problem for paying of small fees at that time was that the minimum fee tompay to a credit card company was somewhere around 3 dollars. So the smallest selling price for something was around 4 dollars. Lets come back to this a at the end of this post.
Suddenly, around 10 years ago companies, especially the online branch of traditional news papers, like http://www.spiegel.de/ [spiegel.de] decided, we indeed need micro transactions. Or the possibility to 'do micro transactions' .
Somehow they made a deal with the 'credit card companies' that they could now sell articles in their online store for 1.50 Euro. Only paying 1 Euro to the card company, wow! Micro payment. That did not work out that well.
Later, not sure what the price is now or if that option for payed browsing still exists on spiegel online, they dropped the price for users browsing an article to 50 cents!
Isn't that amazing (Steve Jobs :) ) ???
So, if I buy a magazine in paper form, and pay 4.00 Euros (the equivalent of 8 articles online payed) I can read something like 40 articles or minor reports and some jokes, a few letters to the editor etc. etc.
Erm ... so I want to save money, time energy, give more money to the publisher (who has not to pay for distribution, printing, billing etc.) and I get less?
Back to the introduction part: when the term micropayment was coined, perhaps 1995, we talked about prices of 1 cent per article. Not 150cents, not 50cents. We imagined that a user had a contract with a search engine or with his ISP. That he would pay e.g. a yearly fee to use that engine, perhaps 30dollars, that is 30cents per day.
That perhaps reading an article on a random web site, not limited to 'newspapers' or 'magazines' would yield the hoster 1cent per view.
So, spiegel online, http://www.spiegel.de/ [spiegel.de] has perhaps 50 million hits per day. Does not matter if it is only 10 per day or even up to 100 million. They have(had?) that subsection where you need to pay 50cents - 150cents to few an (old!) article.
On the millions of hits they earn nothing, except income via advertizing. The subsection which is paywalled(was?) creates losses.
If I'm not bad in math the roughly 50 million hits per day would generate 50 million cents per day on income, that is 500,000 euros (per day!). If coming there would be payed via a true micro transaction. It would be super simple to add something into TCP/IP or HTTP that only lets people get onto payed sides if they really want to. I doubt they ever had hits on the paywalled articles worth so much money.
So, publishers/news sites/magazines spoiled the development of true micro transaction, micropayment systems. They are the reason stuff like Bitcoins got born.
Now they demand a search engine "tax"? How do they suppose that ever will work? I certainly won't visit any of them regardless what law gymnastics they perform. The next step will, be Tor, Bittorents, secret search engines, deep scanning and copying tools/sites or aggregation sites where people 'forward' news like in twitter or here on /. and the original news sites are completely cut off.
Don't get me wrong: I have no resentments against magazine publishers. I have nothing against paying for content. But being forced to pay 100 times more for online content - in our aera - than for the exact same content printed and mailed to my house ... Nope!
The only area where we right now have a very small true 'internet revolution', letting ordinary people publish and sell 'creations' in a way that other ordinary people can 'pay' a 'reasonable' price and finally the original 'creator' gets most of it (not an parasite credit car
Liking Linkin' Love (Score:5, Insightful)
It is rather odd for them to try and tax people for talking about them, which is what this amounts to being. Even worse, they are taxing the people who are polite enough to provide a referential link back that would allow the reader to go to the source which then enables the source to earn something be it reputation, selling something or serving ad copy up which is how newspapers traditionally paid for their paper and ink.
Myself, I love being linked to. Please, link away because that's how the love is spread and the web grows.
Is there any reason Google has to pay? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can't Google just remove the links rather than pay? Wouldn't that hand them an near instant win over this law?