EU copyright reforms draw fire from scientists | Hacker News Reader

EU copyright reforms draw fire from scientists

nature.com

256 pointstouristtam78 comments

> Concerns focus on a provision that would let publishers claim royalties for the use of snippets of information, such as tables or headlines. This was included with the aim of enabling news publishers to secure revenue from social-media platforms such as Facebook and Google. But a proposal added by a European Parliament committee would mean that the provision also applies to academic publications.

In other words, this proposed rule is to address the made-up problem that publishers aren't content that third-party news aggregators are doing them a favor by sending them readers; they want to milk them for additional revenue.

The EU parliament committee seems to be acting consistent with the belief that fixing this perceived unfairness is more important than considering the unintentional negative side-effects.

The questions asked by the parlement (and the US senate) to Mark Zuckerberg show very clearly how minimal knowledge politicians have of the reality as percieved by 'the rest of us'.

did you actually read or watch the whole testimony (of either testimony) or you basing this on ~5 minutes of youtube click bait footage of older senators being confused...

I watched the entire zuckerberg united states senate testimony and I found much of the questioning incisive and valuable

I admit I only read some articles on both encounters (in reputable newspapers). However, those are very much in line with my personal experiences from the years that was running a media company. Politicians are focussed on getting in office and staying there. Being friends with (listing to) the big guys (big names, important companies) is cool and good for status. Mingling with the little guys is only neccessary every so many years (because, what do they know anyway ?). Yes, it made me a little frustrated ;-)

I watched a couple of hours of it myself and saw moments like the "senator, we run ads" moment happen. A lot of the things the media was running off about was taken well out of context. That moment, for example, was not nearly as "oh my god look at this old fart" as Twitter made it. They had already established the fact that FB makes money off ads and the senator was basically poking to see if there was any thought towards another way to make money.

Honestly a fair number of quality questions were asked and deflected by Zuck, and he knew how to play some moments to make the senators look stupid for those social media soundbites. But to be fair, an alarming number of questions were also either very poorly formed (intention was there, a millennial proofread would have helped though) or were thinly veiled self indulgent political maneuvers. Zuck actually did a good job defending net neutrality at one point where the line of questioning was obviously a nod to the ISP cabal.

I don’t think content providers like newspapers feel exposing snippets that are so informative that readers stop engaging with the main site are being provided a valuable service. Google has long since moved away from simply providing ten blue links and now strives to keep people as long as possible on its own site. There’s a trade off between aggregators and the content providers they rely on, and this is a minor correction needed.

> Intellectual-property experts agree that existing EU copyright rules need an overhaul for the digital age

Variations of this idea are the root of all the bullshit that has began with the DMCA and keeps on with periodical attempts to expand it with SOPA/PIPA/ACTA etc.

And the sad fact is that they are right, it does need an overhaul, just pretty much in the opposite direction. With the need for traditional publishers and distributors a thing of the past we should be looking into other ways to monetize the arts to support the artists rather than doubling down on scarcity.

Experts cost money. One side can pay for experts, the other can't. In this case it's the newspapers and publishers. Other times it will be the copyright lobby.

It's reminds me of well-funded think-tanks providing experts with academic credentials very articulately arguing that supply-side effects are a great reason to cut taxes for the super-rich and decrease or privatize those costly public services.

How many think-tanks advocating increasing taxes for the rich to pay for public services for all get a steady income stream?

It's like a biased random walk. Sometimes things go backwards a bit, but the direction's set by underlying bias of the system.

The other side can pay for 10000x more experts. Google is on the other side and the EU has been intentionally ignoring what they've said on the subject for years.

>> Intellectual-property experts agree that existing EU copyright rules need an overhaul for the digital age

> Variations of this idea are the root of all the bullshit

Yep. Now people like Richard Stallman are also copyright experts, too. But in general, the bias is goes the other way.

I think it's a general phenomenon most (but not all) lawyers specialising in a field favour stricter laws in that field. Imagine you are a specialist copyright lawyer. Your most obvious potential clients are big rights owners, you will try to go to the same parties as them and imbibe their world-view.

Indeed. So true.

If you're am EU citizen, you can call an MEP, either with Mozilla's simple but basic tool[0] or by looking at the list of swing MEPs[1] and using EDRi'S talking points[2].

[0] https://changecopyright.org

[1] https://edri.org/files/Copyright_JURI_MEPs_undecided.pdf.

[2] https://edri.org/stop-the-censorshipmachine-suggested-talkin...

I also want to mention https://saveyourinternet.eu/, a joint campaign from some 20 organizations (including Creative Commons and Wikimedia).

The FSFE and EFF are running their own campaigns as well:

https://savecodeshare.eu/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/internet-luminaries-ri...

Please help out to make sure this directive proposal is voted against next week by the majority of the JURI committee. List of handles of reportedly yet undecided MEPs:

@Emil_Radev @1PavelSvoboda @KaufmannSylvia @enricogasbarra @mady_delvaux @FrancisZD @TadeuszZwiefka @marinhoepinto

(source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DfrJ6kpWAAEifEL.jpg)

Full list of Legal Affairs (JURI) committee members that will cast a vote:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/8q1mfc/on_the_eu_co...

MEP @Senficon is leading the charge against this on Twitter with some sensible alternatives proposed.

A good takedown of this proposal that gets into details:

https://www.communia-association.org/2018/05/22/council-parl...

This reddit thread is also a great resource:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/8q1mfc/on_the_eu_co...

Just the mere fact that the EU government can be so technically inept as to draft and circulate such a legislation makes me totally distrust its intentions.

I'm getting GDPR flashbacks.

GDPR benefited citizens and hurt big companies, article 13 benefits big companies and hurts everyone else

GDPR is helping US internet giants and squelching smaller players. I work in the media space and can see where advertiser money is flowing. Advertisers who had previously spread their money supporting smaller publishers including European publishers are now concentrating it in walled gardens to limit any potential liability reasoning that the walled gardens will better be able to handle any arising litigation through their bottomless cash reserves :-)

If the “smaller players” aren’t willing to the take the reasonable steps to protect user data that would cause them to not be sued, then I’m fine with that.

I believe you are missing the point of the comment.

Even if smaller players take all super duper steps to protect user data, advertisers have no real way of knowing if they are in fact compliant whereas they have a simple way of looking at the published balance sheets of the big players and seeing the huge cash pile and armies of lawyers. The scare caused by activists weilding "nightmare letters" doesn't help. Also there's a body of thought in legal circles that even vendor chains needs to be evaluated which is causing advertisers to be wary. Far simpler to just throw money at the biggies who will deal with this.

As usual, the smart money will be in the certification industry that will inevitably come up to tax the mid sized players while the small publishers will die out.

Either that or new small players will spring up that do not base their business on the user as a commodity.

Problem is, those players will still incur the compliance costs. The GDPR rules are not simply penalties for bad behavior. They mandate proscriptive actions companies must take, policies they need to design, services they must perform on demand, etc. whether the company is engaging in bad behavior or not.

I think the basis of GP's comment is the bias a lot of GDPR supporters - myself included - have: we'd like to see the entire advertising industry die. So even if the effects hit smaller publishers more than the large ones, as long as it causes enough damage to the whole business model and incentivizes people to look for alternatives, it's a step in the right direction.

> even if the effects hit smaller publishers more than the large ones, as long as it causes enough damage to the whole business model and incentivizes people to look for alternatives, it's a step in the right direction

Remember the adage “divide and conquer”? If you want to destroy something, consolidating its power base (like GDPR does to advertising in Europe) is a poor first move.

That might be a good first move. It's much easier to regulate one or two evil big corporations than a sacred cow of small and medium business.

> we'd like to see the entire advertising industry die

The GDPR doesn't only apply to advertising companies. When you're offering services in exchange for money you still have your customers' names, IP addresses etc. Even if you aren't using any of that information for advertising or data mining, you still have it, which means you still have the compliance cost. A lot of that cost is not proportional to how much data you have or what you do with it.

And that's the problem. The GDPR will never destroy Google or Facebook, but it can destroy a three person startup that has nothing to do with advertising and might have offered an ad-free alternative to some of their services.

If destroying the ad industry is the goal, why not just tax advertising at >90%?

I think the issue here is that advertisers are not willing to evaluate if clients can protect user data unless large sums of money are offered up front.

And if you don't profit from a website and just want to place advertisements to keep the lights on, you don't have that kind of money.

GDPR is an EU mandated protection for the US advertising giants. It guaranteed EU companies can never challenge them in the ad market. It guarantees the EU can never produce a Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Google, Facebook, YouTube, or any other consumer advertising platform of consequence. Meanwhile, the US ad market will continue to produce an infinite bounty of vast, expanding profit, filling the coffers of the US giants. Those giants will then leverage that to enter / operate in the EU (even if it requires subsidy from the US profit machine), comply with GDPR, and perpetuate their dominance.

How many Twitters EU produced before GDPR? Approximately, 0. If we'll go below that number now, it will be an economic miracle I'd really like to see it.

Now, seriously, there are so many other problems here and GDPR compliance is so easy when you've already paid attention to security of your service, that it really does not make sense to blame a good law. Losers who cannot comply just don't deserve to be on the market.

The story with copyright directive is completely different and has no connection to GDPR.

I think the fine structure of GDPR means that what might otherwise appear to be bottomless cash reserves are in fact only significant cash reserves, furthermore not only the advertisers have made this mistake but also the big players who seem to be operating at least on a quasi-antagonistic mode.

So what I think is - when the antagonism ends up taking big chunks of money everyone will suddenly realize "oh shit, it's not bottomless" at which point there will opportunities to take advantage of.

But maybe my take is too reasonable and instead the advertisers will think oh damn, stuff is really messed up better stay the course with these big guys to get us through these troubled times!

Big companies are made by citizens. GDPR hurt everyone.

I don't think it's bad intentions, just very very poor intuition about how computers and software works. They take it as a given that software-based content filters can and do work reasonably well and that the exceptions are exceedingly rare. Just like the press and government and most Hacker News patrons think that self-driving cars are imminent and real AI is just around the corner, and electronic voting is a good idea; and how the press believe that there's probably a backdoor solution for encryption that is still totally safe.

I think their calculation is far more rational: "There are no large internet companies in Europe (due to their own anti-startup regulation and taxation regime btw), but there are large copyright owners. So let's at least maximize the the value to the EU copyright lobby without any regard for the EU internet lobby (since we have none)".

>"anti-startup regulation and taxation regime"

Plenty of startups from the EU have made it big. Just off the top of my head Spotify and Sitecore are pretty big.

Europe has a bigger population than the US, it should have a lot more startups, but politicians, bureaucrats, existing rules, etc make the economy too unstable and incapable of welcoming new player. People here have learned to aspire for the 9-5 job and can't even imagine that problems are solved by entrepeneurs and not the government.

The reason Europe doesn't have as many startups as the US is because nobody in their right mind would fund things like Juicero here, not because the bureaucracy. The "splash the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks" approach isn't the only way to build businesses.

Frankly the myopia of SV culture is quite amusing to me. California just can't shake it's gold rush mentality it seems. I'm not saying it hasn't served a lot of people well( obviously it has, but to assume it's the best strategy is pretty short sighted, especially considering I've never seen any actual evidence that it produces a larger number of sustainable businesses. In fact most US startups seem to me to be more like schemes for getting aquihire, or straight up hail marries, rather that actual attempts to make money and build a sustainable business.

Also, any entrepreneur that takes the attitude of "it's impossible to do with all of these rules and bureaucracy" is hardly deserving of the name, especially considering it's not really that bad[1], if they were serious, they would find a way to use the rules to their advantage rather than finding excuses or complaining over nothing.

[1] For example in many parts of the EU, not only are taxes much lower than the rest, but costs of living and doing business are as well, and many of the rules are less enforced, maybe Europeans simply don't value collectible blockchain cat pictures or IoT fidget spinners as much as Americans do and are less willing to invest in them.

The same people that funded Juicero funded Google. It's called risk/reward, and it's a astronomically successful strategy.

> nobody in their right mind would fund things like Juicero > US startups seem to me to be more like schemes

This has little to do with mindset and a lot to do with inequality. SV has the highest percentage of billionaires per million citizens in the world. They can afford funding pointless startups that buy each other's products - as a hobby.

This also explains the incredibly high salaries and cost of living.

When a good startup comes out there's enough wealth around to boost it into wild success, create more billionaires and the cycle continues.

>due to their own anti-startup regulation and taxation regime

Mention one such law.

Mention one such law.

EU law that creates a barrier for startups? Here are just a few examples that are likely to be relevant to a typical startup we might have been discussing on HN, in addition to the various attempted IP changes mentioned elsewhere in today's discussion:

* Article 82(c) (the foundation of the anti-price-discrimination regime)

* Consumer Rights Directive

* ePrivacy Directive

* VAT regulations (particularly the 2015 changes affecting digital services)

* GDPR

All of these could credibly have been introduced with good intentions. Many of us would probably support reasonable consumer rights protections or privacy provisions, for example.

However, all of them have been criticised for their practical implementation and their adverse (and possibly unintended) effects on smaller businesses.

It's mostly bad intentions in this case. Gunther Oettinger is a corrupt piece of sht that has proposed things such as "EU carriers should consolidate and they should require consumers to be in 3-year contracts so they can innovate better". Because we all know that industry consolidation and longer forced contracts on users is what makes services better!

He's the one behind these dumb copyright ideas, and he pushed for similar stuff in Germany. He proposed/wrote them when he was still a Commissioner until a year or two ago.

> intuition

If that's it, the real question is why on Earth they're using their intuitions.

When I am ignorant of a field, I don't pretend to be knowledgeable, instead I consult an expert.

Politicians seem unwilling or unable to do this with technological matters.

Politicians generally don't draft regulations. They decide what to sell and then sell it to the public.

Lawyers (bureaucracy, politicians team, industry reps) draft regulations. It is unlikely that the lawyers who drafted GDPR for instance were unaware of possible side effects. Given the enormous amount of legal work in checks and certification that has come out of this for the legal industry, it may even have been intentional.

> I don't think it's bad intentions, just very very poor intuition

Good intentions coupled with poor knowledge is usually much worse than the lack of good intentions.

Vide "In Passing SESTA/FOSTA, Lawmakers Failed to Separate Their Good Intentions from Bad Law" from EFF: https://www.eff.org//deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored...

It is not about being inept but rather being willing to pass whatever someone pays you to pass. They simply don't care about the consequences because these will have nothing to do with them. If sh*t hits the fan, they'll retire on some island rich and happy.

Have you read the draft legislation? Where did you read it?

The EU repeatedly shoots itself in the foot with badly-written laws—aimed at Facebook and Google—landing on itself. Revenue thresholds, for GDPR or this, only above which these requirements activate, are a simple fix. No idea why the European bureaucracy repeatedly opposes such thresholds.

The EU repeatedly shoots itself in the foot with badly-written laws—aimed at Facebook and Google—landing on itself.

Does it?

Europe has been lagging in growth for over a decade now

How GDPR is always listed as bad is beyond me. Do you actually know what it does or are you just repeating what the sellers of your data are moaning about right now?

Privacy is broken, GDPR with informed consent requirements for nonessential data uses, is a first step in the right direction. All the bitching right now is from companies that made money off of selling you out.

And from consumers who want those services to exist at the prices they are currently offered at.

I worry that the days of openness - of FOSS and SV startups, as leading examples - might be looked back on as a halcyon nirvana, a wild and free era, remembered by the few who understand what openness means and what its implications were, and who still remember as new generations grow up accustomed to something else. In the case of something so fundamentally technical, most of the public doesn't understand it; they would not understand the significance and what it has begotten. How many noticed what happened to the streetcars? How many Americans notice their horrible healthcare system, despite overwhelming evidence of far better alternatives?

Look at the CPTPP[0], net neutrality, and this proposed law. Look at the brazen abuse of power by big business in Washington (and in American state capitals and in Seattle and in campaign finance). If you think horrible laws won't happen, won't become fate; if you think it will work out in the end, you haven't read history. There not only have been horrible things like segregation and mass incarceration, which (have) lasted generations, or war upon war, but again and again industry has seized power and cemented their position, and soon it becomes a norm that nobody notices, with vested interests that won't want to change. Look at the current patent system, as a modern, IT-implicated example. Or a better example: Most people blindly accept region restrictions, for example on films, as a norm - maybe something they try to workaround, but an inevitable situation; it's not.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313484

EDIT: Added region restrictions example

Why is it hard to do sane policy?

Because if you listen to the key powers, those key powers act not in the interest of the public but in their own instead. The problem isn't going to get better, as history already shows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

I wonder how it would even theoretically be possible to balance such gravely contrasting needs/wants by whatever definition of representation without ending up at Douglas Adams' quote about summarizing this problem.

> The European Parliament legal committee’s vote on the law, scheduled for 23–24 April

The vote will be on June 20, 2018.

See https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/

Hopefully enough people will protest, like happened with ACTA.

This should be eye-opening to a number of Europeans here on HN who, in the GDPR debate, basically dismissed any possible negative implications of the law by trusting their politicians and basically saying “we don’t have to worry because this is not the United States”.

The problems with EU's incredibly overzealous copyright laws have been known and talked about for decades (in Germany if you take a photograph of the building the architect has some copyrights to that photo). It is a significant issue, and one that is probably perpetuated by the large EU publishing houses like Springer Verlag and so on.

But I think that arguing that because of this issue, other unrelated legislation like GDPR is now somehow "tainted" is being a bit melodramatic. It's not. Privacy laws have been incredibly important in Europe's history and have also been a theme over many decades as well. Not to mention that GDPR was effectively an extension of previous privacy general directives passed in 1995 and earlier. Many non-EU countries also have EU-style privacy laws (like Switzerland).

> in Germany if you take a photograph of the building the architect has some copyrights to that photo

FWIW that is the case i'm almost every country (by the Berne Convention) and some are even more restrictive. See e.g. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Freedom_of_panora... for an overview of the international situation (but please don't depend on that for subtleties).

One is a reasonable set of regulations. The other is unreasonable. Reasonable people can see the difference.

I disagree. I think GDPR is mostly a good law. This copyright law is mostly a terrible law, just like most new copyright laws, including those from the U.S.

For instance, in the U.S. right now, they are working to make copyright terms 144 years and they also want to eliminate the DMCA protections, also making platforms liable for user content.

So I wouldn't say this is a "EU-issue" alone. These copyright laws are getting pushed by the same type of companies everywhere (or even the exact same companies: Disney).

I am not an EU lawyer, but in north america this sort of academic use would not be a copyright violation.

(1) You cannot copyright facts. A study saying that there are "100 hamsters per square kilometer" does not control that fact. Anyone else can also say that there are "100 hamsters per square kilometer". They don't even meed to cite the original study (plagiarism is different than copyright). This is well-understood doctrine, especially for people who make things like maps. A chart or a table is just a representation of facts. Copyright would only be an issue for something like a diagram or photograph, something with some creative input. And even then ... see (2).

(2) Academic citation is covered by 'fair use'. One academic paper incorporating a bit from another does so to either rely upon it for some grander theory (comment) or to say that it is wrong about something (criticism). Google and similar entities covered by this law add nothing and so are not covered by fair use.

How is it even difficult to reform copyright? You focus on the term, and set a timeline for it to ramp down. Say 5 years per year.

Their definition of "reform" is different.

This proposal shows how a body that has a power of creating regulation can get corrupted and there is nobody dare to investigate. I won't mention how much tax payer money could have been already wasted on this. People should be in jail over this.

At this stage it’s clearly an open war between German publishers and media industry with Google and Facebook. The EU citizens will receive the beatings, particular how western world was patronizingly teasing the Great Firewall of China only 5-10 years ago.

The vote mentioned in the article was almost 2 months ago.

The vote by the European Parliament, which is what matters, is next week on June 20.

Worse than net neutrality

Are you saying net neutrality is a bad thing? Why so?

I mean the net neutrality ban. I should probably have been clear about that.

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