Re: Screw Australia's clumsy attempt....
The law is astoundingly stupid. Mike Masnick has analyzed it at length on TechDirt. It's not just charging for linking (and, yes, it's charging for linking, not simply for reprinting content); it's mandatory linking to favored sites if you link to any "news" at all, it's a charging structure which has suffered regulatory capture from the get-go, and it's a patent giveaway to Murdoch.
I'm certainly not a fan of Facebook, but they made the right decision here. Google blinked, and that will prove bad for them and bad for the web as a whole. Not extremely bad, probably; just one of the many tiresome features of stupid misfortune that people who are neither cretinous nor mendacious have to put up with every day.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
