The EU 'attack on the hyperlink'. What's it all about?

After VAT MOSS and the cookie law, those wags at the European Commission are proposing another intervention into the web, and this time they’re looking at the hyperlink. 

In a nutshell, as explained by MEP Julia Reda, the proposed legislation aims to make “search engines and news portals pay media companies for promoting their freely accessible articles”.

As a publisher, we’re very happy for Google to index and point users at our articles, so why on earth would anyone seek to charge for this?

I’ve been asking Heather Burns, a digital law specialist in Glasgow, about the proposals.

Just what is the EU proposing around hyperlinks?

A leaked draft from the European Commission – that’s the executive body of the EU – shows that they are reviving the idea of making links subject to copyright protection. At this stage it is an idea that has not been put into play yet.

The idea is about ancillary copyright. What that means is that a link you make to material that may be under copyright, like an article on ClickZ, is, itself, subject to copyright.

Under ancillary copyright, a person who links to this ClickZ article could be pursued for violating ClickZ’s copyright.

Now, you would never do that. In fact, you want people to link to you and share your resources but you can easily imagine a controlling film studio pursuing everyone whose link to their latest blockbuster film contains anything but a studio-approved URL.

Ancillary copyright would make that possible.

Under ancillary copyright, if I do a search for ‘Graham Charlton’, that search engine would have to pay a small fee, known as a “snippet tax”, to every site which appears in the results.

In other words the search engine is paying a copyright fee for the brief publication of a meta description or excerpt.

Why does the EU, or at least some of them, think this is a good idea? Who is pushing for this legislation? Publishers?

Ancillary copyright is an old hobby horse of publishers and entertainment industry giants who still think they can mould the 21st century internet to their 20th century distribution models.

The European Parliament actually already rejected this idea earlier this year, but industry lobbyists won’t take no for an answer.

It may seem crazy to most people working on the web, but is it likely to happen?

Digital laws rarely have any relationship with sanity. Ancillary copyright drives are borne out of little more than spite and jealousy.

Their idea is to make life more difficult for the tech giants so that smaller, localised tech companies can sprout up, as if by magic, overnight.

There is more than a whiff of nationalism and anti-Americanism at play here.

Would it be workable in practice? It seems, on the surface at least, almost impossible to enforce.

It certainly continues a trend of the creation of European digital laws which, in practice, only serve to micromanage our everyday online interactions into absurdity.

Imagine trillions of automatically generated SERPS each generating a tiny financial transaction which, no doubt, will also incur VATMOSS taxes, along with cookie law popups…

The EU made an absolute hash of the financial systems created by the Place of Supply reforms (VATMOSS).

Enforcement of ancillary copyright will essentially create VATMOSS II, where the larger publishers it targets will easily meet its compliance costs while smaller publishers – as with VATMOSS – will be forced to invest thousands of pounds in system overhauls whose costs will never be met by the taxes incurred.

What would the possible effects be?

An ancillary copyright law is already on the books in Spain, where it’s known as the “Google Tax” as – let’s face it – Google was its target.

Google News shut down in Spain rather than deal with it, and that tactic has now been vindicated.

For Spain, ancillary copyright has been a complete disaster. Rather than encouraging business growth, the law actually reduced the number of publishers because smaller ones went under thanks to the administrative and financial burdens.

The law also created a high barrier of entry for new publishers and paralysed the growth of existing ones.

The most ridiculous irony was that traffic to all 84 major Spanish newspapers dropped after the law went into effect because they were no longer getting inbound links from Google News searches.

Likewise, in Germany, small publishers ended up begging Google to come back to them after their ancillary copyright law caused their traffic to plummet.

The numbers don’t lie: imposing ancillary copyright is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

How can we, as web users, make our voices heard on this issue?

The Open Media Group  is actively campaigning on this issue, as is Julia Reda, the digital world’s hero in the European Parliament. Follow them both for excellent and timely updates.