Will the European Union ruin the internet?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
For those not familiar. There are two main points that are quite harmful:
#1 Mandatory filtering of uploaded user content. This is to prevent possible copyright infringement. There are two things that will happen: the large companies will generate upload filter mechanism that won’t work perfectly so they will deny many uploads. Smaller companies won’t be able sustain an upload functionality. Thanks for killing innovation and supporting large monopolies
#2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw.
The whole thing is nuts. Please, if you live in the EU, call your MEP about this. @senficon is leading the fight on this.
The law explicitly states that the size of the company, the amount of data that is uploaded and the availability, cost and effectiveness of the measures should be taken into account.
I don't understand how you call call this completely absurd considering that sites like Twitch and YouTube are already doing it.
> Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content.
The "link tax" has nothing whatsoever to do with linking. If you run a commercial site that publishes snippets of press publications you now have to obtain a license to do so. That's all there is to it.
Suppose someone posts a Der Spiegel article. I read it and quote a sentence in a comment. Y Combinator must now (a) reach out to Der Spiegel, (b) negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of Der Spiegel content, (d) remit international payments to Der Spiegel and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU compliance costs entail? (I'm ignoring questions around whether including the article's title itself requires fee remittance.)
That's what is being proposed and that is dumb.
I think it is a bad proposal that will do more harm than good. But it is something that can be made to work.
Pardon me, so I post a comment on Hacker News and now Y Combinator has to (a) identify Der Spiegel's collection agency, (b) reach out to said agency, (b) negotiate a fee agreement with them, (c) monitor my quoting of Der Spiegel content, (d) remit international payments to Der Spiegel's collection agency and still (e) subject itself to other risks and requirements the fee agreement and EU compliance costs entail.
This system having the benefit that when I quote Le Temps, presuming they work with the same collection agency, we cut out step (b). Otherwise all of that again.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/plmrep/COMM...
For example, if you want play music in a restaurant, you know who to contact. In return you get the right to use all music ever created. No need to figure out who owns what.
> The rights referred to in the first subparagraph shall not apply in respect of uses of insubstantial parts of a press publication
The actual law is bad enough. You don't need to make shit up.
To copyright holders nothing is insubstantial. Playing 6 notes from a song is enough to be considered infringement, apparently. There are countless stories of things like people uploading family home videos with the radio playing in the background that get taken down. Copyright enforcement has gone way too far!
No it isn't. Just read the damn thing.
Here's the specific article:
Article 11 Protection of press publications concerning online uses
1. Member States shall provide publishers of press publications established in a Member State with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC for the online use of their press publications by information society service providers.
The rights referred to in the first subparagraph shall not apply in respect of uses of insubstantial parts of a press publication. Member States shall be free to determine the insubstantial nature of parts of press publications taking into account whether these parts are the expression of the intellectual creation of their authors, or whether these parts are individual words or very short excerpts, or both criteria.
2. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall leave intact and shall in no way affect any rights provided for in Union law to authors and other rightholders, in respect of the works and other subject-matter incorporated in a press publication. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked against those authors and other rightholders and, in particular, may not deprive them of their right to exploit their works and other subject-matter independently from the press publication in which they are incorporated.
When a work or other subject-matter is incorporated in a press publication on the basis of a non- exclusive licence, the rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked to prohibit the use by other authorised users. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked to prohibit the use of works or other subject -matter whose protection has expired.
3. Articles 5 to 8 of Directive 2001/29/EC and Directive 2012/28/EU shall apply mutatis mutandis in respect of the rights referred to in paragraph 1.
4. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall expire 1 year after the publication of the press publication. This term shall be calculated from the first day of January of the year following the date of publication.
5. Paragraph 1 shall not apply to press publications first published before [entry into force of the Directive].
If it's regarding the "insubstantial parts" clause, that language is immediately neutered in the next sentence: "Member States shall be free to determine the insubstantial nature of parts of press publications." TL; DR Watch twenty-eight national regulators each interpret the law according to their own whims. In the meantime, pay your European lawyers every time a user quotes a BBC article in a comment.
> "Member States shall be free to determine the insubstantial nature of parts of press publications." TL; DR Watch twenty-eight national regulators each interpret the law according to their own whims.
They've managed to interpret fair dealing / fair use since the Berne Convention was introduced 1886. I think they'll manage.
You seem to think that both articles are somehow connected. Article 13 only applies to sites that are upload services like YouTube and SoundCloud for example. They now have to implement content filters in order to avoid liability. Hacker News doesn't have to do anything.
b) do you know how a link works? Any link is usually a preview of content because it has e.g. a title. Where do you draw the line? And what is a commercial site exactly? Google news is free for example. We have tried this in Germany and in Spain. It didn’t work. Why do it on EU level again just to put every site owner at legal risk?
teamhappy, your arguments make no sense. Obtaining a license to quote a news article? YouTube's content filtering held up as an example of a system that works well? These are ridiculous statements. I hope you are getting paid well and don't really believe this stuff.
If you or anyone wants explanation of why we have this rule, I've posted a ton about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
> ...who obviously don’t understand how the internet works...
Legislators are not requested to know how things do work: they are requested to define how things will work!
Someone could legislate that all websites should be blue and http headers should be made of emojis, there is nothing in nature that would stop that from happening. In fact, network protocols themselves are basically laws for machines.
I find this actually quite good. Companies accepting "user uploaded content" are mostly entirely pointless, cost a lot of bandwidth and unnecessarily centralise yet another part of our lives. Anything which harms them will effectively be a net positive.
> #2 Link Tax: publishers want to be compensated if you link to their content. This is to prevent google and the like to profit from publishers content without “paying” for it. This is totally absurd. Again, two things will happen: large corporations will stop linking to publishers site (see how google Spain stopped their news offering) and second everybody posting links online publically will become an outlaw.
Note that it’s not a link tax but a tax to use snippets of the article. You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok. Right now this is already a somewhat grey area and, again, it won’t exactly hurt anyone but the right people.
So, sure, this is some extra burden yadda yadda, but mostly it will just limit pointless business activities sucking up bandwidth.
Is this user-uploaded content to Hacker News intended to be ironic?
You just uploaded user content to HN... well.
You’re quite fine linking to an article, but reproducing parts of it won’t be ok.
This is a link in HTML: <a href="URL" title="link title" target="link target">link label</a>
The "link lable" is a preview/snippet of content. If I a quote 1-2 sentences from the article, it is a snippet. Where do you draw the line?
If you've quoted an insubstantial portion then the law already says that's ok.
It's really important that people who oppose this law are strictly correct when talking to their MEP, because otherwise we risk everything being ignored because of these factual errors.
> Why is a title not a preview? I know you will quote the law with the "substantial" part, but until it is not defined 100% (e.g. by courts), everybody linking and quoting is at legal risk.
Berne Convention was introduced in 1886. We've had 130 years of interpreting copyright law to find the limits of fair use.
But, since you're interested in legal risk, the law attempts to clear up one area around orphaned works.
> This Directive provides for rules to adapt certain exceptions and limitations to digital and cross-border environments, as well as measures to facilitate certain licensing practices as regards the dissemination of out -of-commerce works and the online availability of audiovisual works on video-on-demand platforms with a view to ensuring wider access to content.
I think it's a bad law, and I've already contacted my MEP to talk about it, but I think people really need to read and understand a law before campaigning about it.
When people talk about "link tax" their MEP will think "this law does no such thing, this person doesn't understand what they're talking about, I can ignore them".
It's a very harmful bit of campaigning to promote the myth of a link tax.
This is a policy, and a lot of people want to and will game to varying degrees. They want to extract money from others using this regulation.
Sure, this sounds nice to have a license, and sure negotiating with Google et al. is very hard, and I'd be happy to help content creators somehow, but this is basically legislating the BuzzFeed model. Mo' clickz, mo' moneyz. That's a very risky deal to enshrine in law.
Bureaucrats who have a complete disconnect with what they are legislating but that somehow need to keep justifying their own job existence, will go ahead and vote regulations one after another even if they are unnecessary or harmful.
Bureaucracies will keep themselves alive by inventing new rules constantly and the EU is no different.
GDPR was not that bad though, it was about making sure that our personal information is not being sold to third parties like HR companies that provide services like telling companies your sexual orientation and other things of that nature.
GDPR was about telling the consumer what is being done with their data and about transparency, so at least it was for the people.
But this link tax is beyond absurd, and the content upload copyright infringement is only enforceable by the biggest companies.
In practice, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud will implement this on their cloud services and probably charge for it directly or indirectly to SaaS companies, and there will be a couple of years of a grey zone period where the law will not be actively enforced.
The flaw in the EU's design appears to be how easy it is for the EU to enact new legislation versus the public's ability to stall that process through hearings or a court.
If you say so. Seems to be more about threatening small players with risks well beyond anything reasonable.
Their intention doesn't mesh well with the law as created. I'd say the biggest outcome is the number of services the EU has lost from the GDPR.
The biggest problem with the GDPR is the FUD that surrounded it. How often is it that people are charged to the maximum effect of the law? Yet for some bizarre reason that's exactly what people thought would happen against every small operation once GDPR came into effect.
The smaller players are rightfully too afraid to do anything that the big players that can get away with. You may not see GDPR fining small players, but what you also won't see is small players innovating as much out of fear.
If you don't do enough, you face the prospect of severe penalties. The GDPR's defenders can claim that enforcement will be reasonable and proportionate, but the fact is that the maximum potential penalties are written in law, and it's not as if national authorities have never been excessive with their EU-derived powers before. On the other hand, if you do too much, that's wasted time and money, possibly it's limited useful data processing more than you were actually required to, and now you're at a competitive disadvantage.
The issues about filtering user-supplied content that arise because of the proposed copyright changes are directly analogous. There are vague suggestions about proportionality, but no-one really knows how this would play out, and the potential harm to anyone hosting other people's content if the new laws were interpreted in a different way could be severe.
What do you think small operators would rather deal with?
"You can be certain you're doing nothing wrong"
or
"You might be doing something wrong, but they'll probably be lenient".
If geoblocking European visitors is no big loss, of course they'll go for it. Which many here seem strangely okay to accept, given staunch positions about net neutrality.
Or previous "rounds of solutions", if you were a music or video or print rights holder / publisher.
s/innovative/"innovative and illegal"
While everybody has got used to "freely" enjoy copyrighted content on internet, IP protection is still a pillar for the low of most (if not all) countries in the world. Let's stop being hypocrite: either we push IP into oblivion or we enforce it consistently. Pretending that IP laws matter only when it concerns our own content doesn't help innovation.
False dilemma. I can quote a sentence from the New York Times in a Hacker News comment without incurring, for myself nor Y Combinator, any financial obligation. "Fair use" has admittedly been over-narrowed in the U.S. But it still exists.
Why do you think it isn't enforced consistently? The vast majority of copyright infringement isn't a criminal offence, but a civil matter, which means the rights-holders are the correct people to take action if they wish.
Why do IP laws apply to the internet, exactly?
Imagine what would happen if China decided that it made a law outlawing any and all mentions of the Tienanmen Square Massacre and decreed that because of that law, all websites which serve information to Chinese people should comply or face massive fines?
The example makes no sense because it has nothing to do with IP. It is also dependent on jurisdiction. China has no power to implement global laws.
Apparently they have, because IP laws do, as you said, apply to the internet.
> The example makes no sense because it has nothing to do with IP. It is also dependent on jurisdiction.
The example was absurd by design. IP laws differ strongly per country. Which of those should the internet adhere to? All of them? This would not work, since some works which are protected by IP law in one country would not be by another country. Should it be decided by the country of the uploader? Or that of the downloader? Of maybe the country of the server where it's stored, or each countries' IP laws in which there are nodes it passes through as the data gets to its destination?
There is no sensible and doable way to apply IP laws, or any countries' laws in general, to the entire internet. The entire idea is, to me, a non-starter from the get-go.
No.
> because IP laws do, as you said, apply to the internet.
IP laws that are different depending on where the peers are.
> IP laws differ strongly per country. Which of those should the internet adhere to?
The user will have to respect whichever laws apply to the user, the host will have to respect the laws that apply to the host, the business owner will have to respect the laws that apply to the business owner etc. It's not rocket science. You're talking about it as if it's some sort of hypothetical situation we have yet to solve, but this is how it works now.
The problem is that no mechanism can exist to reliably enforce genuine IP rights as provided by law today without also causing collateral damage and excessive costs.
I do think the current implementation of copyright in law is flawed in a lot of places. This is bad because it potentially imposes excessive restrictions on ordinary people and sometimes limits how much we can take advantage of the benefits of new technologies. It is also bad because it brings the law into disrepute, and combined with the practical difficulty of enforcement particularly against small-scale infringement that is only a civil matter, it results in a general sense among much of the public that infringing copyright is a victimless crime and socially acceptable.
The current attacks on the Internet are sponsered by Axel Springer (largest newspaper buisness in Europe) and the result of massive lobbying. They even used openly pressure and the supporters in the EU are fed bullshit stories. There is a useless lex Google in Germany called Leistungsschutzrecht, the link-tax is the attempt to a weaponized version through the EU - sponsered by the CDU and conservative and right-wing politicans.
Their hope is to somehow rescue their broken revenue model and make everyone pay for their content.
Upload filters are likely the lobbying result of the content companies.
I have the strong suspicion that the EU parliament is acutely aware of its situation. That's why they pushed for a lot of pro-consumers laws, as part of the their PR campaign to make them seem as a benevolent force of good. After people have their guard down, they can start with phase two do what politicians do best.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_p...
Sounds a bit un-democratic, no?
But many times it's not. Any Congressman or Senator can introduce legislature onto the floor of their house. The requirement that proposals originate in the Commission is problematic.
The Council, moreover, is analogous to a meeting of State Governors or Attorneys General. The only truly democratic arm of the EU is the Parliament. Its role at the end of the chain is problematic. (Contrast that with the analog in the American system, the House of Representatives, where appropriations bills are required to originate.)
The problem with democracy is people vote once every few years and see that as their voice being heard. In the meantime governments are free to do whatever they want just so long as they can win back public support in the weeks leading up to the next election.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/01/18/more-surveillance-pleas...
Overall, the UK population has consistently supported stronger surveillance powers for a long time and by a clear margin. For better or worse, we tend to trust our authorities here. And to be fair, most of the time, our authorities do seem to use their powers responsibly, so to some extent that trust has been earned.
One problem with this is that whenever surveillance issues have been discussed in the media and these polls have been carried out, they invariably talk about giving powers to the most serious policing and national security organisations using the powers to defend against the most serious of crimes and security problems. However, the reality is often that the laws allow for much more than that, with many more people getting powers and access to surveillance data, with much less control and oversight than the public might expect, to deal with minor issues where intrusive surveillance is wildly disproportionate, but most people who aren't heavily into tech or civil liberties don't realise any of this at all.
The Commission (a vast body of appointees controlled totally by just one man) is the only EU institution that can actually initiate changes to the law. Every other body merely gets to slow it down. This means that if something is on the Commission's agenda, it gets proposed, and if the Commission disagrees, the views of the other institutions are worth nothing.
This setup is very clever because it allows the EU to look superficially democratic without actually being so. Look at all the people saying "write to your MEP" on this thread. It's useless, because of the following process:
1. The European "Parliament" cannot initiate changes to the law (i.e. it's not really a parliament). It can ask the Commission to do it on the Parliament's behalf, but the Commission can say no or propose something different.
2. Therefore, political parties in the EP don't have any real policies. They can't: creating a political party that e.g. campaigns for better immigration control is meaningless in the EU because the Commission will just say no.
3. Therefore, the sort of people who go to sit in the EP and try to win EP elections are basically yes-men, people so enthralled with the whole concept of the EU they just want to be a part of it in some small way, along with a small collection of people who are there only to troll and try to get their country to leave at the EU's expense, like Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen.
The entire system is designed to LOOK like a democratic government but without ever having to respond to what voters actually want.
> The entire system is designed to LOOK like a democratic government but without ever having to respond to what voters actually want.
The same could be said for any major democracy I've followed. How often is it UK voters get the policies they (we) want? Who actually voted for the snoopers charter (etc)? What about American voters? Policy over there is often biased against the average voter. The depressing reality is that normal voters opinions don't generally amount for much when it comes to law making.
I think Sir Winston Churchill put it best when he said:
> Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
MPs didn't want Brexit. Voters did, now it's happening (maybe, unless the government blinks first in the MAD standoff the EU insists on).
Voters wanted stricter immigration, even though many MPs are convinced immigration is a net positive. They are getting it.
Voters refused to contemplate tax rises, or so it was believed, so reducing the deficit has been done primarily through spending cuts and the growing economy.
Voters are obsessed with the NHS - just a few days ago there was an announcement of a huge pile of new money for it, wasn't there?
Seems like whilst it can take time and of course politicians can pass laws nobody asked for, if you take the top 2-3 priorities of the voters at any point, the government is usually responding to them in some way.
.. according to Dominic Cummings, this was because they were promised a huge amount of money for the NHS. This has been re-announced by Theresa May with no real explanation of where it would come from.
And now ... what exactly is happening? There's still a horrifying lack of confirmed detail.
> Voters wanted stricter immigration ... They are getting it.
Are they? Through which policy changes?
The "hostile environment" policy and promises that post-leaving, EU immigration will be controlled too.
What really worries me is that voters can't see the "flow" of immigration, they can only see the "level", and they're going to keep voting for more and more hostility so long as they keep seeing nonwhite faces or hearing people speaking Polish. Even if those people are in fact full British nationals.
Plus while I'm obviously not going to defend the EU's copyright reform proposal (hopefully it will be rejected in July) the other governments I've listed haven't got a much better track record for copyright reform themselves.
Anyway, now it is not the time to stay idle, it is time to call your MEP and campaign against link tax (article 11) and upload filters (article 13). https://saveyourinternet.eu/
After that the next fight will be when the trilogue between Commission, Council, and Parliament is done.
GDPR is one of those things.
You mention forgeting to file some paperwork: here's an example of an organisation handling sensitive medical data who, by law, have to register with the regulator. They didn't register.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-26/u-k-healt...
> The U.K.’s Data Protection Act requires all organizations processing personal information to register with the U.K. data regulator. Although handling sensitive data on recent patients and those needing regular health care, Cera also failed to register with the Information Commissioner’s Office until February this year. The ICO said in a statement that it would only consider “enforcement action” if a company failed to register despite ICO advice.
They didn't even get a fine. (Maximum available fine at the time: £500,000.)
Also, this whole "GDPR has good intentions therefore it's good" idea that is cropping up on this thread is very problematic. We don't judge laws by their intentions but by their outcomes.
Copyright came about to support and foster creativity, it was meant as new form of property because creativity has no clear boundaries.
About the intentions of the GDPR, they were clearly to give people more control over their data and give business more restriction. The basic rule of the GDPR that companies should only store the data they really need at that time not more, not less. Overall this is what the GDPR does. My issues are more like, in some cases the burden for SME are too high and too weird for consumers. Like increasing the age limit from 13 to 16 or demanding complex privacy policies which no-one reads
The GDPR should have been the basic privacy policy for everyone, only if you do something different you have to transparent about it. Like transferring data to a third party.
It might be as simple as it being both.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/06/21/is-the-eu-reall...
A popular claim by many supporters of the Leave campaign is that the EU is run by ‘unelected bureaucrats’. How much truth is there behind that claim?
This claim mainly refers to the EU Commission: the EU’s executive body. It is true that the Commission President and the individual Commissioners are not directly elected by the peoples of Europe. So, in that sense, we cannot “throw the scoundrels out”. It is also true that under the provisions of the EU treaty, the Commission has the sole right to propose EU legislation, which, if passed, is then binding on all the EU member states and the citizens of these member states.
As opposed to the UK, which has one democratic house, an unelected one, and a (mostly) rubber-stamp unelected head of state.
Clearly, 51% are sufficiently convinced it's bad to want to leave.
The remainder are not made up of people who think it's good. Many of them also think the EU is bad or deeply flawed in various ways, but that either leaving is too risky due to the EU's stated guarantee of severe retaliation, or that the EU is bad but the UK could stay and fix it.
In my own family we split down the middle. Two voted out, two to remain. The two remainers voted to stay only because they feared the economic consequences, and the promised recession that was supposed to follow any vote to leave (it didn't). Neither of them are especially keen on the EU, although they don't dislike it either. They didn't really think about it much before.
It's in the nature of the institution that is has no personality or theoretical consistency beyond a very basic legal and cultural compatibility.
Would you rather have one set of rules for trade that you have to deal with, or thirty different potentially incompatible ones, not all of which are translated into English?
A study of American history reveals the wisdom of governments defaulting to inaction. If the country is split 50/50 on an issue, the proper thing to do is debate. Not wait until it's 51/49 and then pass a law half the population hates. We love to complain about gridlock in Congress but, most of the time, that is the system working as designed.
Twenty-eight countries would be harder to do business with. But as it is, GDPR will be interpreted by each of the the EU's twenty-eight national regulators. A single market the EU is not.
Co-ordinating twenty-eight nations to enact a treaty is a huge friction. But perhaps that is needed to counterbalance the continent's instinct for useless, often protectionist bureaucracy.
This is far more democratic than the secret processes of other international trade treaties like TTIP.
> wait until it's 51/49 and then pass a law half the population hates
.. which is what's happening with Brexit? I mean, the British system where a party is elected with ~40% of the votes and legislation is run through an entirely unelected upper house isn't an improvement. And don't get me started on the non-constitutional approach to devolution.
Here's an article about it:
> one set of rules for trade that you have to deal with
because it makes my life easier.
As a citizen:
> thirty different potentially incompatible ones
People in France and Greece and Poland have very different values.
Some countries think people should work for a large part of their lives and retire when they're old. Others think everyone should be able to retire much earlier and spend time with their families.
Some are liberal Christian / agnostic countries, others are conservative Christians.
None of those positions are right or wrong, but enforcing the views of 29 others on you and your citizens is fraught with trouble.
a) It's only potential incompatibility. Nothing stops governments bilaterally or multi-laterally synchronising their rules when the differences are trivial and unimportant.
b) What you describe as potential incompatibility, I call competition. If Spain and Germany wants to go off and try to extract money from Google for the "privilege" of linking to newspapers, they can do that, but it shouldn't impact everyone else. The EU artificially ties together many different policy areas that are unrelated and do not need to be take it or leave it, because they know full well that only a near-fundamentalist opposition to "cherry picking" as they arrogantly call it can ensure the bad ideas are universally adopted along with the good.
And as for not having English translations, that's on governments to fix. We live in a world where bilingual English speakers are not exactly hard to find.
Unfortunately, neither of those things happens consistently the way you might expect. One of the big problems with the EU VAT changes for digital services was that suddenly instead of just knowing your own country's tax rate and being able to apply it throughout the EU, you had to know each member state's tax rates and in some cases their oddities around things like invoice formats or special classes of products or services that carried different rates. In other words, those changes did essentially the opposite of what the EU is supposed to do.
Going the other way, if treating the whole EU as a single entity also means you can't offer products or services at different prices based on the widely different economic conditions in different member states, that is a large and entirely artificial distortion in the market, and it's a policy with questionable social and economic benefits.
The Maastricht Treaty explicitly formed a supranational organization [1]. We can debate whether the expansion of the original EEC was wise. But the expansion was mandated.
> The Maastricht Treaty explicitly formed a supranational organization
Their is not entirely the case though. The EU is able to deliver some pretty severe penalties to member states not complying with EU mandates laws and regulations.
This new copyright law though seems quite a departure. TBH a law that is practically speaking unenforceable is not a law. I'm surprised it has been allowed to get this far.
While it could get ratified into law, at this point it seems out of character of the EU in general. It might have been intended as a shot across the bow towards search engines, and to get a bargaining chips for some other legislation or initive that also somehow includes the search engines.
But whether it's ratified or not, a lot of damage has already been done, as this is just too easily made into very plausible EU-skeptic newbites even though some of the skeptic representatives had a hand in it.
I'm not a particular fan of several aspects of EU, but when the alternatives looks mostly the same old tired nationalistic yearnings if they are thought out at all, I'll take the EU any day.
It is unhealthy.
For example Netopia which is sponsored by the film and music industry and the Premier League says consumers are diverse and that is why EU wide licensing is a bad idea.
An organisation of the picture industry claims directly to speak for photographers, even though they are their suppliers
But it works, politicians of all parties argue that those copyright regulations will help creatives and creators, that those people need platforms to present their art is not important, they are supposed to go to the old players (gatekeepers).
P.S. Platform company are also not speaking for creators and creatives. I think HN is full of links to articles about how YouTube isn't listening to the creatives who use their site. And how YouTube is changing the site to make is worse.
Here they're talking about letting the content creators retain their rights, and that copyright protections cannot be used to prevent publication in other places.
> 2. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall leave intact and shall in no way affect any rights provided for in Union law to authors and other rightholders, in respect of the works and other subject -matter incorporated in a press publication. Th e rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked against those authors and other rightholders and, in particular, may not deprive them of their right to exploit their works and other subject -matter independently from the press publication in which they are incorporated. When a work or other subject -matter is incorporated in a press publication on the basis of a non- exclusive licence, the rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked to prohibit the use by other authorised users. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 may not be invoked to prohibit the use of works or other subject -matter whose protection has expired.
This new right was "tested" in Spain and Germany. In Spain news sites lost 15% of their traffic. Bigger site were hit less hard because people knew them and got to them directly. In Germany they gave Google essentially a license for free because Google didn't want to pay and because the publishers couldn't lose the traffic from Google. But smaller companies than Google and start-ups had to pay, putting them at clear disadvantage. Also the scheme costed around 10 million euros in legal fees had almost no income for the publishers. A Massive failure.
But they passed it anyway yesterday.
English -> German: "Ich würde sagen, dass es möglich sein sollte, die "Snippet-Steuer" (auf die die "Link-Steuer" tatsächlich zu kommen scheint) zu umgehen, indem Sie eine generierte Zusammenfassung des verknüpften Artikels anstelle eines Snippets verwenden."
German -> French: "Je dirais qu'il devrait être possible de contourner la "taxe de snippet" (que la "taxe sur les liens" semble en fait arriver) en utilisant un résumé généré de l'article lié au lieu d'un extrait."
French -> English: "I would say that it should be possible to bypass the "snippet tax" (which the "tax on links" actually seems to arrive at) by using a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt."
Close, but not identical. Using different translation engines gives results which differ more from the original text at the cost of accuracy, e.g. feeding the French text to Bing Translate renders the following in 'English':
(Bing) French -> English: "I would say that it should be possible to bypass the "snippet Fee " (which the "tax on the links" actually seems to happen) using a generated summary of the linked article instead of an excerpt."
Not perfect but certainly usable.
This is just a committee vote. It's not law yet. The overall vote is in July.
https://changecopyright.org/en-US/ https://www.saveyourinternet.eu/ https://act.openmedia.org/savethelink-call https://edri.org/next-steps-copyright-directive-article-13/ https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/not-giving-up/
Not every country is represented in these committees and as such you might not have a representative and you'll have to look for the parties to find an equivalent from another country.
IMO, this is also glaring hole in the design of EU's democratic structures, because the chance of other-countries representatives answering to your questions is practically zero, while at the same time them being subject to corporate lobbying from whatever country.
the legal affairs committee : http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/juri/home.html
the votes on "copyright in the digital single market" (pdf) : http://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/149721/juri-committee-...
And if your country like mine is about to have elections this fall, don't forget to mention that in your letter to the politicians! ;)
If you think the law establishes a link tax you should be able to link to the article that does so.