Hacker News Reader

Comment by indigochill | Hacker News Reader

If I may play the devil's advocate for a moment here, isn't this a boon for decentralizing media? If third-party publishers like YouTube are crippled, perhaps there's more room for self-hosting your content, enabling you to build your brand on your own terms rather than YouTube's? Perhaps it's time to stop outsourcing the publication of our content to third-parties and host it ourselves, especially now that granularly-scaling cloud servers are an option?

But I'm not very familiar with this bill aside from the fact everyone hates it, so someone can probably point out why I'm wrong.

View on HN

I does not matter who hosts. Because, if you haven't paid your royalties, your are not allowed to host the remix/meme/... yourself.

It hurts also decentralization has anybody who provides space becomes responsible.

No, it won't help with decentralization. Only big players will have enough money and resources to implement these filters and requirements effectively, small news aggregations that work for 100 users will just disappear. I imagine there will be boom for companies that identify and track text and multimedia online and report it automatically. I don't think services that work for small number of users will be able to afford their API.

I would say it would encourage more networks to band forces just linking to each other not charging one another. Which just leads to growing echochambers.

I don't think that running your own cloud server is a feasible strategy for most people who put hobbyist content out on the Internet. You are over-estimating the technical abilities of many people here, I believe.

So the next best thing to achieve decentralization is federation: what Mastodon (joinmastodon.org) and to a lesser extent PeerTube are successfully implementing. This means most people will still entrust their content to third-parties, but there will be a lot of these third-parties which federate among each other and you can pick e.g. the Mastodon server of your local hackerspace or the PeerTube of your university to publish content.

And this is why these proposed new EU rules are so horrible: because they won't "punish" Google or YouTube so much (after all, they already have a lot of licensing arrangements and automatic content filters in place) but they will kill off your local hackerspace's Mastodon instance: because they now either would have to pay a lot to a) lawyers, b) content ID providers, c) link licensing services or face lawsuits.

So in my opinion these laws are actually horrible for decentralizing media...

> perhaps there's more room for self-hosting your content

You still need to drive traffic to your content. That's the entire point of places like YouTube: discovery. The fact they host and process your video content as well just makes it that much easier for users. Hosting it yourself won't get you any "eyeballs", so I think you're confusing two different things.

You're right, it's not just good decentralizing media, but for decentralized everything. The technology to go fully decentralized has been ready for years, but its usability is still lacking (high latency, low bandwidth etc.). But at some point, if the copyright industry goes to far and the existing services are significantly reduced or outlawed, decentralized solutions become attractive again.

Right now the offer from Netflix is somewhat ok, although extremely reduced due to geographical restrictions, so not much need for Popcorntime. If the offer is further reduced while keeping the same price, at some point it'll be time for popcorn again...

Analogously, if this media linking copyright stuff goes through and too far, somebody might build the popcorntime equivalent for news consumption...

I think the problem is that if we wish to draw attention to your excellent content then we must repost it or at least link to it. This is where those platforms we repost on will filter the repost (thus the nickname "link tax").

In addition to other concerns posted this bill seems to open the door wide to content trolls (similar to patent trolls) who could acquire a small portion of the content being referenced by a site, then threaten that site with large legal bills.

This would likely hit small companies and individual users hardest and could be a boon to various governments who want to silence a particular view.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com