It’s good to find that Andrew Coyne has been paying attention to my rants at the screen (and whoever else is in the room) whenever this issue comes up in the news. The stupid claims underlying Bill C-18 are indeed “as if sending millions of readers our way every day, for free, was somehow a form of theft”.
My own frustration with such claims extends back to the earliest days of the web when some academic institutions seriously considered requiring those of us trying to collect and evaluate resources to comply with prohibitions against linking without permission.
(Embedding ripped content, especially without attribution, is of course quite a different matter, but that needs to be dealt with separately – perhaps even with some restrictions on what constitutes a “fair use” excerpt.)