EU copyright law proposal rejected
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Also it is important to keep in mind the old tricks used to pass bad laws: they push initially for worse laws then after public protest they slowly step back to the initial goal to pretend people were listened to, so that not only they get what they wanted, but the public is also being fooled into believing their protest were successful and they have politicians who actually listen to them. How lucky!
Link tax and other new laws will make sure that networks that spread truths goes underground.
I've even seen some proponents of the bill lament that the lobbying by the "GAFA" (google, apple, facebook and amazon) won, so I'm sure some of them actually believe that they're fighting the good fight against the multinational behemoths who are trying to pillage European resources. It's relatively easy to justify the bill if you take it purely at face value without thinking about the consequences: the big players like Google make a ton of money by linking to other people's work without redistributing any of the profits to the creators, let's fix that. Of course, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and clueless politicians.
That or it's the Illuminati, who knows.
So.. flat earth, anti-vax, 9/11 truther, NWO, aliens or... what? What's your poison?
The truth about the fuckedupedness of our civilization is all readily available for you to read. Just no-one cares.
I haven't found a book even close to state of the art... For a reasonable price.
Springer research collections come close but they're very expensive. Journals are expensive and worse...
Even more insane is that the overwhelming majority of society (not just Millennials) thinks that the Holocaust was the most deadly mass murder in the 20th century.
< https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_t... >
The "40% don't know that 6 million Jews died" is technically accurate (page 2) but slightly misleading. They thought less than 2 million people died, which is still pretty crazy. The phrasing I provided was how I saw it in the new article(s) that pop up. And that's for the people who actually have heard of it. Apparently 22% have never heard of the Holocaust at all or aren't sure they have ever heard of it (also page 2). However, the 66% stat is straight off of page 4 and not misleading in the slightest.
If it applied to all laws, you could pretty easily imagine some negative consequences (attempts for marriage equality or suffrage could have been delayed by decades if the opposition tried to introduce laws in a way that would be guaranteed to not pass). And what if the circumstances change within that decade so that an old law proposal now makes much more sense.
I do think that the law-making process should have quite a few more safeguards. The way that after-the-fact amendments work (in America or Australia for instance) is quite scary -- though Australia does have double dissolution which intends to prevent deadlocks and the Senate changing laws without authority from the House of Representatives.
It's not so much about "harmonizing the markets" - it's just full speed ahead, high and low, idealistic, corporatistic, amateurish or razor sharp, but all the time relentless building the superstate.
It's not clear what you intend to do with these names, but I don't see anything good coming out of it.
As to what intent there is with those names, it could be boycotting products/services from certain organizations -- which is a very valid and legal form of protest.
If you’re fearful of your name being public, associated with this line of work, you should probably reevaluate your actions.
If you support or participate in the further tightening of copyright (when considering how extreme copyright law already is), you are the enemy, and citizens are well within their rights to publicly document your actions.
Whether people are married to their ideas through money or ideology, you are left with little recourse. History is written by the victor, not the noble.
When one group wants people like yourself to lose medical care and die where is the middle position?
Ultimately I expect them to eventually react violently to losing power and have to be put down by force in order to preserve some notion of democracy.
On perhaps your side of the pond it seems that one side wants to strangle the medium for culture and civilization in order to make a few bucks in hopes that a fraction will stick to their hands. These people are surely personally your enemy whether you recognize it or not.
When has attacking an abstract idea ever accomplished anything?
Who was the enemy in that movement? Did making lists of enemies help? Or was it more battle of ideas where people's minds were changed pver time?
Unfortunately I have a feeling we're about to see this scenario unfold with respect to gay marriage and LGBTQ issues in general. Theocrats do not like to lose, any more than copyright maximalists do.
It's kind of scary to start assembling lists of peoples' names that are your opponents.
If you want to defeat your opponents, a great thing to do. Keep track of them. The best service you can give to an enemy, is to forget him.
>My opponents are bad laws and bad ideas. Let's make lists of those.
Don't you think that bad ideas are possessed by bad people?
In my view of the world, the root of all good and bad are the people. People's deeds and ideas don't live separate lives from physical human beings having/doing them.
Individual people may have both good ideas and bad ideas, and those may change over time.
Lists of opponents' names are a really bad solution because they ignore the distinction between people and ideas.
Dude — already happening.
Just demonstrating that you know a lot of even remotely private information about somebody is a very effective intimidation method.
Let's imagine a world where as you suggest, corporation names are revealed but not individuals. Well, where does that leave us? Maybe I'll just go as myself instead of my company. I won't represent my company, I just happen to be its CEO, its chief lobbyist, or whatever.
So no, we'd need full transparency. This kind of thing is common among various branches of democratic governments. Presidents' schedules are usually mostly public, fundings of various sorts are public, etc.
Opaqueness leads to darkness.
It's also extremely weird how a satire political party regularly makes the most sense by bluntly stating like it is.
Maybe that's the actual secret to proper politics: Saying it like it is, spiced up with some fun.
It's a matter of finding out how; you can probably just ask the right people and you will have your answer.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/eu-affairs/2...
Anyways, Interesting analog. Intellectual dishonestly aside...
I have no first hand knowledge, but it seems highly probable.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1220...
Reminds me of ancedotes of devs intentionally wasting ram in old school console game development; locking it up in some obscure way; just so that at the 11th hour, you can remove it and claim "amazing optimizations". ;)
I've heard similar stories with regards to censors. I've also seen it at work with release reviews. Pointy-haired management was given something obvious to correct, to keep them from thinking of something out of left field.
It depends on who is on the other end. Against someone who isn't that intelligent, who prioritizes and really just wants to show their dominance, it can work great. Against a genuinely observant and intelligent perfectionist, it's the wrong move.
I've seen it done with alignment and spelling errors. The pointy haired boss feels superior and useful in their attention to detail, and everyone has their needs fulfilled.
That's called haggling or bargaining and is old as the notion of trade.
The other approach, of course, is to pursue incremental change. In the same "ZOMG tricks" lens, that's boiling-the-frog-slowly.
No, you push for massive overreach. You never start negotiations asking for what you want.
Then it goes to an "election", the "opposition" party (come on, they all drink at the same bars, do lines of coke in the same toilets) wins, and the "watered down" bill basses with bipartisan support.
We don't live in democracies. Two reasons:
1. regular employees don't get a "winter break"
and
2. Until we have real time visibility of political donations, filtered through an anti-corruption body, we can't know whether the people in government deserve, or are eligible, to be there.
We're talking about the EU here, everyone gets 4-6 weeks off a year
Not only do most Europeans get our 4-6 weeks of paid vacation. We also don't subtract any sick days from vacation days as is common in the US. We also get paid while sick. In some places by the employer, in some places by the government. Sometimes full pay, sometimes a reduced amount. We also have excellent government paid health care. We also have long termination notices. We have protection for temporary workers (so generally few Europeans work in Amazon jobs with day laborers picked up in the outskirts of the cities). Working weeks are typically 35-40 hours. We have protection for part time workers too. They can not be discriminated against. We have 1-3 years paid maternity leave. In some countries it's paid by employer (with refund from government), in other places it's paid by government directly. Usually the pay is part of salary. We have high participation of women in the labor market. We have paid paternity or parental leaves that are often longer than the American maternity leaves. We have government or labor union set minimum wages but most people make more than the minimum wages. Very few Europeans hold two jobs. If we lose our job, we have various welfare payouts and most importantly; we don't lose healthcare. At the end of working life, Europeans retire with public pensions and private supplements.
Now, there are variations from country to country since not all of the above is EU based; actually little of it is. I am speaking as someone who live in Denmark, Spain, the US and now Bulgaria. Every country in Europe has more of one thing and less of another. In Denmark, for example, the paid maternity leave is only at around one year, and women get paid what amounts to only a small fraction of their salary. In Bulgaria it's up to 3 years, of the first is 90 percent of salary, the second is around minimum wage and the third is without pay.
But generally speaking, European workers live a very sheltered and, I would say, privileged working life. I have yet to meet Europeans fearing loosing a job the way Americans do.
My point is: changes.
So yeah, changes. Not just what, though. Who. You gotta ask the right person to have the right answer, democracy be dammed.
(Just to be clear, I will resent them for a long time for this. Representatives should not be able to override the people's direct decisions.)
So if you want to get something passed, you brainwash 1/4 of the population to demand it.
I'd rather my laws were divorced from manipulated emotion
Err, this simply means that EP didn’t rubber-stamp the proposal, as happens most of the time, but that the plenary will vote on it in September, and MEPs may propose amendments.
I.e. what should be a standard democratic process, but isn’t in EU for some time how.
They will not “try again” - attempt one is still ongoing and may very well succeed due to gross misunderstandings of the process and the general impression among people that the battle was won and it’s over.
It really isn’t just yet.
Having said that, it's good to see EU didn't sell us out at the first chance.
It's very much an uphill battle.
why the downvotes?
What was desired by these leading anti-EU folks was not a victory, but a very close loss. They get to keep blaming the EU for every problem (useful, when the biggest gripe--immigration--was entirely under the control of the UK, not the EU). They get to demonstrate that they have too much support to be ignored, but they don't have the responsibility of actually enacting the agenda.
You don't pay millions in to Tory funds, employ MPs and give pensions to ex-MPs and not get your way.
Edit: apparently I'm not surprised. Or not allowed to be.
As best i can tell, you can draw clear EU sentiments based on age and education. Younger and better educated are largely pro-EU as they are in a position to seek employment within the euro-sphere virtually at will (and may had friends all over thanks to various EU education programs).
Others have watched local industry either moving their activities abroad, or simply running a skeleton crew between contracts. And when a contract hits, most of the people working there may not even speak a language the locals understand.
Yes that may sound like racism, and the extremists can score some cheap points on it, but for the most part the issue is one of livelihood.
Where as previous generations could count on their industrial or service job to carry them through setting up a home and starting a family, now they can't. And they see the EU as the reason why by eroding their access to jobs.
As we've seen with GDPR, not being in the EU wouldn't actually help much with this because almost all websites would still want to sell into (or even be run from) the EU.
The Labour MEP on the legal affairs committee voted in favor of the copyright directive. The conservative member abstained.
It is also a dry subject that most people don't care about until they get a sour letter from some lawyer because Timmy discovered bittorrent.
The "value gap" argument used to justify the EU copyright directive is right there in the 2017 Labour manifesto: https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/labour-mani...
The conservatives have used similar but more general language as well.
How dare Europe even try and protect the rights of private individuals. /s
(But either all the current disorganisation is keyfabe or this lot couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag, which is going to result in us taking whatever we can get)
Which pretty much mirrored the actual result. It was very close.
I did not downvote you, but I think you are getting beaten because you brought up a potential hot topic (brexit) in a way that is unrelated to the discussion topic (copyright). The argument that parties could have been using similar tactics is IMO irrelevant even if true (and that is not clear to me either).
Though in that particular case the "fishiness" led to rather a lot of journalists reporting on the general hilarity of the situation, which probably helped it fail. The bad guys will have learnt from that and will probably avoid any obvious fish-connections in future.
Hilarious, but this is how they should have done it properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGBZnfB46es
# How much is the fish!? The bigger fish keeps eating all the smaller ones. It's not like anyone cares. Nah, let's just go watch some football, shall we.
It's only just making the normal news[0], but their pettiness has plagued the sharing of small clips and highlights.
Do they really want me to wait for an incident to be televised before I can discuss it online? Should I have to track down specific moments in a game using my own recording in order to be able to discuss it? FIFA, the World's Most Corrupt Organisation™, should realise that fans enjoying and discussing their events adds a lot of value and will drive more viewers.
[0] https://inews.co.uk/video/fifa-delete-twitter-video-of-boy-c...
That, and the crap Vettel pulled to get past Webber in Malaysia in ... 2013? How time flies..!
They have gone to great lengths to ensure the only way I can view live F1 GPs legally is to pay 25€/mon subscription to the cable company. If I had a choice, I would actually be happy to subscribe to UK's Sky Sports F1 channel, who for 20€/mon have much more extensive coverage of the whole GP weekend, with world-class commentators in studio and on track-side, including retired F1 drivers' title holders. The cable company broadcasting in my country has lower quality and less content, so I don't feel like paying them each month more than I pay to my ISP.
But of course, due to the very same geo-blocking rules, Sky Sports F1 is unable to sell their subscription to my country, because they only have rights for UK broadcasting. Same thing applies to Netflix etc., where some content may be available in one EU country but not in another.
This is actually a violation of the EU's core single market principle (customers should be able to freely procure services from providers in any EU country, not just providers in their home country). And a few years ago, the EU Parliament was actually bullish about abolishing the whole practice of digital content geo-blocking within EU.[1] They eventually did pass new digital market regulations, but of course the content industry was able to water it down so that it doesn't actually apply to them at all![2]
[1]: https://torrentfreak.com/europe-will-abolish-geo-blocking-an...
[2]: https://juliareda.eu/2018/02/eu-did-not-end-geoblocking/
Go out and create your own content. Until that becomes predominant they have no reason to care. And frankly neither do I; it has never been easier to make videos, take photos, make podcasts and broadcast them.
This whole copyright-law furore has really highlighted the entitled attitude of most Internet users nowadays.
Make my own international football sporting competition? Or buy tickets and stream on Periscope, a practice that is heavily frowned upon and The Premier League are actively looking to ban.
Anyway, the reason I hold my viewpoint is that FIFA are meant to be a non-profit organisation. They are meant to exist for the good of the game; to most people that means the more people watching, playing, engaging with and talking about it, the better.
It's clear that over the last thirty or forty years FIFA officials became more interested about lining their pockets. That's how Russia and Qatar managed to buy World Cups; it's how decision makers at every level received bungs and suitcases full of cash; it's how FIFA's rights management division went on the warpath; it's even responsible for the swathes of empty 'VIP' seats you see in prime positions at high profile games (even more after half time while prawn sandwiches are on sale in the exclusive bar).
It's disgusting behaviour, they need to get back to their original ethos and allow the game to flourish.
In a democracy, that usually is a far away parliament, that removes the elected individual out of touch with the worries of those elected, so he/ she is not reelected.
Fifa should give every fan a vote.
Yes. They sold the exclusive right for lot's of money. In some countries even with a Multi-Laser approach where one station is allowed to transmit live and another station is the first one being allowed to use snippets for summaries.
> Should I have to track down specific moments in a game using my own recording in order to be able to discuss it?
No. You are not supposed to track it. You are supposed to see the programs so they get high ratings and refinance their license.
That's how the deal works and it's a constant battle, whether this is a private entertainment event or something of newsworthy character ... intermixed with international copyright law.
That's the thing though, I do watch the games live. I also like to follow and discuss key events on Reddit match threads (which are fantastic, informative, funny and insightful).
They wouldn't be possible without easily accessible clips; there are no official alternatives and with the rights situation the way there are, it's unlikely to happen legally (even with a fee) any time soon.
FIFA (and UEFA, and the FA) are simply unable to compete without rethinking the way their licencing works. They are simply being left behind.
This is not true for Germany and maybe other national license holders. In Germany the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF have the whole matches and summaries online for free (i.e. https://www.sportschau.de/fifa-wm-2018/video/index.html ) But that's geo-blocked from other countries as they only have a national license.
At least over here streaming is a large part of this (best way to reach people in offices for matches in the afternoon) and they pay a lot of money for that to FIFA, where FIFA then ensures the exclusivity.
It ain't nice and too much money involved to really free that up.
No surprise that the NBA is huge and fast growing in younger demographics!
This isn't unusual and it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to see a pattern. In fact, if you don't want too much public scrutiny, this is exactly what you would want to do. Actually Germany provides a good example for where this might work because historically Germany always made it past the group stage and Germans in general tend to follow their World Cup coverage fairly closely -- and it would have worked this time, too, hadn't it been for those meddling South Koreans.
Might've been just me.
I don't quite see how the World Cup is more than a small news story. Why isn't it one item in News and then all the detailed stuff in Sport section.
(Yes, I'm watching it, yes I enjoy it, yes I love football; no I don't think the BBC should devote half the resources they are to it.)
On June 25th the Ten O'Clock news running order was Heathrow, Grenfell, Migrants, Student Suicide, Swansea Lagoon, NHS, Turkey (1m20), Prince William doing something, then finally the World Cup which was 3 minutes at the end of the program (England had played the previous day)
On June 26th I don't think there was any world cup.
The Ten's running order (tweeted daily by https://twitter.com/paulroyall) is an indication of what the BBC thinks was important that day (where Today's running order is what the BBC thinks will be important that day)
That's the most number of viewers for anything since the 2012 olympics. 1 in 3 people in the UK was glued to their screen watching, and that was the first round. Tomorrows quarter final I'm sure will be even higher.
This world cup is major news for the UK - even for those like me that don't watch football. My understanding is that the BBC coverage is better than ITVs too.
(BTW, the BBC's facilities in Moscow are dwarfed by Fox Sports, and the U.S. isn't even in the competition!)
This is the bbc news page I see. World Cup is below the fold: http://imgur.com/c2mkpAkl.png
Thank you to whoever is involved. You are fighting for me and I appreciate it. I'm going to make a habit of writing MEPs and generally getting behind you guys. I want my next comment on the subject to be in the first person (we).
But.....
I feel like we're at a real structural disadvantage. Copyrights (up generally) are under constant expansive efforts. Expanding rights. Expanding duratii. Expanding enforcement. Practical enforcement edforts that will result in dragnets (like this, now defeated proposal).
The saintly activists are working to defeat restrictions, but they can't win every fight. This proposal will be back, in modified form. It's a ratchet. Sometimes we don't lose. Other times we lose. There are no wins, just defense against loss.
For a practical example: YouTube is the biggest video site, and it does not honour fair use. You can't (easily, anyway) automate fair use detection, so it gets caught in the copyright violation dragnets. In practice this weakens fair use rights. I'm sure pressure from copyright holders played a role on YouTube's policy decisions.
Is there (or can there be) an activist effort that puts pressure on YouTube (just for example) to protect fair use rights, and freedom of expression generally.
Are there wins we can aim for? Is an effort to shorten copyright duration feasible? I think the economic argument is on our side, even if we accept the other side's premises. Is a fair use expansion campaign possible?
http://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/dutch-news-organization-de-...
entering into a contract for the exploitation of the rights
I don't know of any copyright law in any country that provides a way to "destroy" copyright before its term has elapsed. In the US, it seems to be held to be possible by legal tradition.
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCode.do;jsessionid=52B3...
L121-1
> L'auteur jouit du droit au respect de son nom, de sa qualité et de son oeuvre.
> Ce droit est attaché à sa personne.
> Il est perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible.
But AFAIK they have already changed that and this text doesn't reflect the recent changes (it's the proposal of the comission AFAIK).
I guess the contrarian in me requires more analysis and reasoning than I've found in the top google search results or following some of the links posted here on Hacker News. In fact I'm aware that I often take positions based on disliking the presentation of arguments and this is a personal flaw.
But I have to say most of the pieces I read rub me up the wrong way by seemingly just repeating arguments from authority or presenting interpretations without any logical reasoning built on primary sources (i.e. the text of the directive).
Many of the pieces, even by respected sources, seem very click-baity where it seems there is competition to come up with the most apocalyptic claims. The directive will lead to the end of the internet itself seems to be the bar.
When I finally found a piece which actually quoted text from article 13, for example, it didn't seem to explicitly support many of the claims. Is there a mandate or even reference to upload filters in the text of the article? Does it reference memes at all? I'm happy to be correct if there is. But if there isn't, I don't see an obvious path from the primary text to these sort of claims.
The actual text of the article that I've seen quoted seems to simply codify the status quo that currently exists in nearly all countries. Which is that content aggregators are oblidged to cooperate with copyright holders to block copyright infringement. Google, youtube, eBay, etc., etc. have been doing this for years without "killing the internet". Don't all countries with copyright laws already provide legal mechanisms for holder to force content aggregators to remove infringing material?
If that's the case, then this is simply a typical EU directive - which just represents some sort of minimum standard based on the existing laws in the 28 countries.
As I said, I'm happy to be corrected if someone can provide an argument based on the text. Please reply with links or references instead of down voting :)
I would rather not change anything instead of risking broken legislation that does more harm than good.
> Google, youtube, eBay, etc., etc. have been doing this for years without "killing the internet".
Google has the infrastructure and resources to do so with YouTube, going out of its way to detect copyright infringement and to react automatically to take down notices. Smaller players don't have Google's resources.
This is not the same issue as with GDPR. Even if companies need to invest resources in being GDPR compliant, it can be argued that business models relying on the ignorance of users are criminal enterprises and that GDPR-style consent should have been asked for without having a law for it, being common sense in a world where people don't understand the repercussion of their actions when using technology.
But copyright? That's a government granted monopoly and like all government granted monopolies it can do more harm than good. It can be argued that copyright is flawed, especially given the forever extending duration, currently being life plus 70 to 120 years, which is absolutely ridiculous. Give us 20 years, like patents and then we can discuss about extra protections otherwise fuck media companies lobbying for even more protections.
> Google has the infrastructure and resources to do so with YouTube, going out of its way to detect copyright infringement and to react automatically to take down notices. Smaller players don't have Google's resources.
Worse, even Google sucks at it. There are so many original creators whose youtube video get slapped ads on because someone else used their music in a Youtube video before the original author did. Google wrote a fully automated, non-appealable copyright judge and jury. This is scary shit! I don't understand how anyone can look at stuff like that and think "wow, awesome, we need more of that!"
And executioner. Because they remove accounts over this.
Curious about your choices with stuff like this.
But article 13 does not seem to represent an extension of copyright powers since it looks weaker than any of the existing national laws.
> Google has the infrastructure and resources to do so with YouTube, going out of its way to detect copyright infringement and to react automatically to take down notices. Smaller players don't have Google's resources.
I've read this argument and it doesn't really convince me. Google and the rest run sophisticated copyright infringement detection not because they CAN or have the resources, they do it because they are obliged by US copyright law. The same US law applies to smaller players and it doesn't seem to have broken the internet in America. Try launching an app that allows streaming video torrents for example - even a teenager working from a bedroom has to comply if they are going to offer such a service.
No, they are not obliged to do so. The DMCA obliges people to remove infringement on request of the copyright owner, i.e., it requires that websites be reactive instead of proactive. This is notable because Content ID is actually more restrictive than what the DMCA requires (particularly with regards to fair use exceptions).
The upshot (wrt upload filters) is that the proposal makes platforms directly liable for the actions of their users. This follows from the text in the proposal where hosting user content is defined as an act of communication to the public.
The talk about filters comes directly from Voss's (the law's author's) blog, where he explains the law and what is intended with it. There is a specific reference to google's content id as an example of the kind of measures services are expected to implement. In the law text these are refered to as "effective technologies". The specifics of how the filter is implemented is not exactly relevant in this case, but another aspect is - currently nobody except google has an implementation of this technology, and google's implementation has very bad recognition rates and is also easily circumvented. So if you run a service that allows user-uploaded content, you now either pre-screen each post manually, license a buggy filter from google, take the risk of being sued for something your users posted, or block user-submitted content entirely. The last one is the only option for things like small forums.
Reading specifically into the law's author's blog post about this, they state that if something is wrongly filtered, the recourse is attempting to force the service to accept the upload by taking them to court. Clearly this is not something you can do on a routine basis, so if your content gets wrongly identified as infringing (and of course automated systems cannot recognize parody, or remixes, or similar but unrelated content as non-infringing) you'll end up effectively prevented from posting it.
So yes, you're right that there are already mechanisms to take down infringing material. The added change in this law is that it makes publishing infringing material the point of liability, and so each service becomes responsible for all the content that its users post. This is the significant change.
Because, here is the full text of the infamous article 13 and there is nothing in it that I can read as "makes the publishing infringing material the point of liability": 1.Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter. 2.Member States shall ensure that the service providers referred to in paragraph 1 put in place complaints and redress mechanisms that are available to users in case of disputes over the application of the measures referred to in paragraph 1. 3.Member States shall facilitate, where appropriate, the cooperation between the information society service providers and rightholders through stakeholder dialogues to define best practices, such as appropriate and proportionate content recognition technologies, taking into account, among others, the nature of the services, the availability of the technologies and their effectiveness in light of technological developments.
Looks like the text has changed a bit since it was last in committee ("non-availability" changed to "prevent the availability") but in this case the issue is:
"[...] service providers [...] shall [...] take measures [...] to prevent the availability [...] of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders [...]"
This is a bit technical but "shall" here has the legal effect of "are under obligation to". This is what makes responsibility for content a matter for the service provider, whereas previously the service provider was not required to prevent availability, only to take content down when requested. The current situation is that the USER is responsible for copyright infringement, and the service provider is not, for user-provided content, but the service provider has to respond to and act on takedown requests. This is what's being changed.
And "effective content recognition technologies" is what other people are referring to as "upload filters". This "content recognition technology" (which Voss specifies to be google's content id or something very like it) is given as an example, but there are no criteria here other than appropriateness and proportionality, which are not defined anywhere (is it proportional in terms of effort for the rightholder, the user, or the service provider?) and it's unclear what the alternative to said technology could be. Practically if it's your responsibility to prevent the availability of content you need to screen it before publication, either manually or automatically, and somehow allow rightholders to prevent its publication. This could mean comparing against a list of all copyrighted works, but that would cause difficulties in compiling such a list, keeping it up to date, and deciding how close a match it is. Voss, in his post, says that publishers will provide service providers with such lists, but the comparison operation itself is computationally heavy, especially for video, and also error-prone. It's also subject to abuse as anyone who claims to be a rightholder can effectively censor anyone else's content by putting it on said list. Youtube is the only implementation I'm aware of of such a technology, and their filter is terrible in terms of recognition, both in false positives and false negatives. The law as written effectively gives no alternatives to content recognition technology (are you going to manually check that everything everyone uploads is not on a large and growing list of works?). In the end, whatever implementation is picked, it will effectively prevent the publication of a large category of legitimate content.
Putting the matter of whether the whole thing is a good idea aside, it's also bad law, in that it's an unclear formulation of requirements that leaves a lot open. It leaves the question of what is appropriate and proportional to member states, and ultimately to the courts, because it doesn't specify any criteria. It gives a specific technical solution as an example but doesn't specify what makes it appropriate or not, making it, again, a matter for the courts to decide whether specific implementations are appropriate or not. It doesn't even specify what qualifies as "large amounts" of works.
In particular I see no preventing publication, and the rightholder has to actively take part to indicate/identify the matter.
Beisde, the most recent text I see http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=REPORT&mo... is a wasteland. Articles 13a, 13b and 13c popped up into existence, article 13 got itself a point -1 (that's a minus one). No wonder the Parliament requested further work. Which is what it did contrary to misleading reporting of rejecting anything (in particular any of the articles specifically).
Also, the text functions in a whole context of European law and reuses lots of notions. For example who is a commercial service provider seems to be lifted directly from a law being in force since the year 2000.
Most European law is peppered with calls to scale and proportion you take issue with, and yet they exist and live on with little problem.
Sorry, that's inaccurate.
The rightholder has to provide the service provider with a list of content and the service provider has to prevent anything on the list from becoming available. How do you propose to do this except by filtering content before publication? As soon as something that is infringing is published, the service provider is on the hook. So either you filter or you're in violation.
As a proposal of a proportional way to do the same without opening the door to active censorship, there could be a content identification system that identifies content to the rightholder on upload, and then allows them to file a takedown request. This solves the problem of automated blocking of misidentified uploads, and leaves room for fair use by the mechanisms of existing takedown claim and counter-claim processes. But that's not what the law requires - it requires preventing availability.
The most unfortunate thing I find about this is that's just a broad directive for each of the member states to implement its own way. But that's a general argument about every EU regulation.
On legal technicalities, the article doesn’t impose on publishers the obligation to “prevent” the availability of copyrighted content, only to “take measures” toward that aim. The rest of the article further elaborates on the requirements and the process to define proportionate and appropriate measures.
https://juliareda.eu/2018/06/article-11-13-vote/
In what follows, I'll say a bit about Article 11, because it's the part of the debate that I have been following more closely, and the one that I actually care about.
There is some context to this. This is a change that media corporations have been pushing for for many many years. When they did so at the level of national law in several European countries, they weren't quite as good as they are this time around at concealing their dark design. They basically came straight out and said: "We want to create an organization representing all of us in collective bargaining against the likes of Google. We want that organization to collect money from Google, compensating us for displaying headlines, webpage titles, and automatically generated summaries in search results and on Google news. And we want to change copyright so as to make it so."
Some of the legislative text that was passed around on the national level in several European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Spain, actually made explicit mention of automatically generated summaries of copyrighted material, or use of copyrighted material by search engines and content aggregators etc.
In Germany, such a law actually entered into effect. Here is some more reading on that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_... http://www.taz.de/!5064771/ (in German)
Then Google set up an online platform that press publishers can use to declare that they are okay with Google continuing to use their stuff for free. Content by any press publisher that's covered by this ancillary copyright who has not entered into this agreement with Google then disappeared from the index.
Guess what happened next? Everyone signed the agreement.
So, it's essentially dead law now. It doesn't affect Google, as everyone signed the agreement. So far, the media aren't going after the smaller content aggregators, stepping lightly around the touchy subject, but it's certainly creating a lot of legal uncertainty for search engines and content aggregators who aren't Google.
But they're still hard at work, trying to make this into a "world revolution", the hope being that, one day, enough material will be subject to this ancillary copyright that Google will no longer be willing to lose all that content and therefore the threat of just taking it out of the index will have lost its sting.
Now about what's going on in Brussels: Back in September 2016, the Commission set up a draft for this new Copyright directive, which read pretty innocuously. It had an Article 11 that basically just said: "We want press publishers to be able to have some kind of a copyright in their material." From a U.S.-perspective, you probably wouldn't understand what this is even about, as, in the U.S., this has always been the way copyright worked. An employee would routinely say, in their employment contract, something along the lines of "for copyright purposes, my employer is the creator of any work I create" and that's that. In Europe, copyright is non-transferable. The only way you can be the creator of work is if you actually created it, e.g. an individual journalist or programmer, not a media or tech company. So, the way this article actually read was so as to imply that, for the special case of press publications, the Commission wants Member states to implement copyright to allow for stuff to happen that already routinely happens in the U.S. So it was fairly technical, uninteresting lawmaking.
Then, between September 2016 and now, secretive, intransparent, corrupt bullshit took place behind closed doors. A committee was formed. The committee voted in changes to the proposal of a Directive to be voted on in parliament. Nobody friggin new what the changes actually were, as a text wasn't published at the time the vote was taken. Then, on June 29th, leaving only three full workdays to when the draft directive was supposed to be voted on in parliament, they published the text, and did so in a completely unreadable format.
You have to read it as a meta-meta-meta-level document. The document wasn't law. It was changes to be made to a proposal about things that the Commission was going to force Memberstates to implement into law.
Where it previously said:
"Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC for the digital use of their press publications [i.e. with an ancillary copyright].""
It was now going to say:
"Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC [i.e. with an ancillary copyright] so that they may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of their press publications by information society service providers."
So, previously, you could have read it like this: Well, publishers are now going to have copyrights, but copyright is already pretty clear on hosting exceptions, quoting exception, etc., so nothing will change for search engines and content aggregators. Now that reading was definitely out! Now, the directive made it clear that this was going to be an ancillary copyright, an additional right that should have the effect that search engines, content aggregators etc should pay press publishers for something extra, something not already provided for under current copyright.
And Julia Reda makes the point, which, I believe, is very valid, that, since the proposal made it clear that this was going to be a new/extra right, it was not clear at all, that certain limitations that apply to copyright also apply to this ancillary copyright. In particular, Reda notes that, to be the creator of a copyrightable work, you need to create work that crosses some threshold of originality. But in order to enjoy this ancillary right, all you need to do is to be a press publisher. So this is the way, that, this time around, they snuck back in the idea of "A headline is not too short to enjoy protection", or "If Google shows the bits about our content that have the search term in it, with dots in between, that doesn't mean the content doesn't still enjoy protection" etc. etc.
Hope this was helpful in clarifying a few things.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
You will probably need to search for a few formal definitions, but in my opinion it's relatively easy to understand.
In favour: 278
Against: 318
Yet, I'm worried now that those articles were just ludicrous distractions for the real problem. That is, it shouldn't pass without those articles, but those that would oppose it normally would now vote in favor of it because "at least it doesn't have those articles anymore".
like how [politics] the current political climate and news coverage is pushing what used to be extreme-right standpoints more towards the more acceptable political middle. As in,"well at least we're not separating kids from parents anymore"[/politics]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
It's a political tactic used since at least Roman days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_initiative_(legislati...
The only way to match the funding behind copyright increase is to appeal to the public, but the opposite lobby control the media which most of the public feeds on as if it were manna from heaven.
Reduce copyright to 15 years? B-but Mickey will die, and we'll be so poor at EvilMedia Corp. we won't be able to make any more Marvel or Star Wars.
1. For copyright, these 21 years should be organised as 4-12yr granted (varying on the work, lack of registration meaning public domain by default) and renewable every six months with an exponentially increasing maintenance fee (first maintainance fee might be placed in the ballpark of £8192).
2. For patents, these 21 years should be organised as 3½ years after grant (this will encourage to file as soon as possible to get protection), renewable every 3½ years with an exponentially increasing maintenance fee (first maintainance fee might be placed in the ballpark of £1,048,576).
3. For sculptures and buildings, these copyright should cease one year after construction is completed, but with a limitation that protection not allowed to exceed 7 years in total.
None of these are European, though. Should be easy to sell, especially now that UK is exiting.
This kills European AI startups or drives them away.
What matters is that EU AI startups are more restricted than US startups.
Large internet companies like Google and Facebook will face even fewer restrictions because they have the clout to force economically viable terms on publishers.
Schools have to have PRS (songwriters) and PPL (musicians) collection agency licenses if they have TV because the license they pay for TV doesn't cover the music "performamce" eg of an adverts soundtrack.
Individual solo workers can't listen to a radio at work unless they're unable to be accessed by the public.
You can time-shift a TV show (say), but you're only allowed to watch it alone, and you can't watch it twice.
UK is draconian in the extreme.
Personally I'd favour a 15 year term, and only for works that have an identical un-protected copy lodged with a central agency (at a high cost), or are DRM free. Transfer/download rights for copies bought on streaming services; format shifting, relaxed time-shifting, more educational use rights, etc..
There is very little chance that the UK will have substantially better rules than the EU post Brexit.
Could the EU copyright law be slipped in the same way?
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/23/cloud_act_spending_...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2005/jan/23/eusd...
The realist in me can't imagine the outrage will be any smaller the next time they try to pass it.
A special award goes to a Slovenian NGO for making this hilarious vote tracking page:
Greens, Regionalists, Pirate, Left and Eurosceptic Populists were strongly against, but only have 120 votes total. Eurosceptic Conservatives and Liberals were mostly against, but only have 124 total. Social Democrats (167) and Far Right (32) split evenly. And Far Right (177) were strongly in favor.
I'm guessing that Eurosceptics are mainly against more EU laws. And that it's largely Social Democrats that have the votes to pass a weaker version.
When youtube content id matches 10 seconds of black screen as a copyrighted material, it shows that these systems are nowhere near production ready.
I am all for fair use and credits when it comes to creators getting paid for what they deserve but, when you need couple of lawyers to dispute something as a student on internet against enterprises, then freedom and equality of Internet disappears.
There's no one filter nor any way to do this. YouTube designed and implemented a system. Some other sites might have their own design. Most have nothing.
Try to think about what's needed to create something like a filter. It's quickly obvious that it's a massive undertaking (expensive). If I'd be Google, I'd actually be happy with a strict law as YouTube has a filter. All other competitors would immediately have a huge disadvantage.
Note: I quite like Formula 1 and I've noticed that people quite easily get around the YouTube filter. They make the video a bit smaller, add some moving stuff around it and they're done. This while the filter blocks valid use cases.
e.g. trade agreement, national constitution, fair use, orphan works, compulsory licensing, RAND licensing, creative commons, public domain, freedom of speech, freedom of information act, right to know, accessibility for blind/deaf, access by libraries and archives, educational use, citation rights, remix models, national incentives for creativity and innovation, ...?
Interesting takeaways:
1. As is usual, party discipline was very strong on the national-party level, but usually weak on the level of the European political grouping.
2. The center-right EPP grouping voted by a large majority for the regulation.
3. There was a very strong national divide between France (>80% in favor) and every other large state (small majorities against).
4. Party discipline on the European level among the Socialists (S&D) broke down completely, leaving them split about 50/50. For example, German SPD voted unanimously against; the French, British, Italian, and Spanish socialists by large majorities in favor; and most of the socialists from small states voted against.
5. The liberals (in the European, FDP sense), were split within parties at a high rate.
6. The nationalist far-right (the French party formerly known as the Front National, Lega Nord, etc.) and the Eurosceptic right (e.g. UK Conservatives, the governing Polish PiS, etc.), which usually vote similarly, split along national-party lines.
And, they're using your own money against you. Sales revenue, all the higher and more profitable as they tighten their control.
Your tax dollars. Here in the U.S., there is an ongoing conversation about the continued efforts to "criminalize" IP infringement. Not only do the "big players" already have the advantage in terms of the ability to pay -- potentially endlessly -- for attorneys. They are trying to get the government, with its deep pockets and salaried attorneys, to take over prosecution of civil law infringements.
Which also means less government attention to crime that may actually concern you, its citizens, more.
Now, if the world were getting better, one might debate whether these are useful changes. Instead, it seems most people who take the time to understand this, and who aren't benefiting from tacking on another 20 years to Micky Mouse's exclusivity, find the changes both absurd and a hindrance to real productivity and creativity.
Workers in the U.S. have had to compete not only against lower wages, but also against lower costs of producers who don't respect and pay for the IP they use. Some of the same companies that scream bloody murder about infringement in the U.S., turn around and use those producers abroad because of their lower costs.
They're using your own money against you.
(And, I've got nothing against the rest of the world catching up. I do resent and oppose the arbitrage practiced by such entities, in combination with convenient legal and political collusion, to greatly enrich themselves while perhaps even impeding real progress.)
P.S. Regarding the "tricks" used to escalate their control, mentioned by the parent commenter. One of those is the current proliferation of "trade agreements". One member is convinced, bribed, coerced to increase an IP "right". The trade agreement includes an automatic mechanism for "harmonization" between members. The other member states use said "harmonization" as the cause that increases that right in their own state.
People living in the latter may never have agreed to e.g. another extension to length of copyright. But suddenly they have it, via "harmonization". And politicians saying, "The treaty made us do it."
This has all been discussed before, on the Web. But I haven't seen it surface prominently, in a while, and it bears repeating for those who are just becoming familiar with the issue.
And here is how different parties voted: https://i.redd.it/xcr22o59g5811.png
Why is your country's current extent and size optimal? Why not split it up, maybe even down to sovereign towns?
Why not unify it with one of your neighbours?
For example after 45 years of in-fact occupation by the Soviets people here won't easily accept censorship and wrong-think laws. Those things are too fresh in memory. It might be easier for our politician to vote for that in EU parliament when they are safely away from home (they didn't from what I understand) but they would think twice voting for it here.
Another thing is that people follow country level politics much closer than they follow EU politics which seems to be very detached. What usually happen is "GDPR got voted in EU, we need to adjust our laws" without any kind of public discussion about if we even want that law to begin with.
It may work somewhat better in USA where at least there is one language and some common element in education system (history, civics etc.). Here it just seems that People's Party Committeein in Brussels is making up laws and we are supposed to just accept it.
That is an omission of your politicians for not involving the public into the discussions, as there certainly are deep debates at the EU level that your elected politicians participate in.
And don't critisize the King or the Military. 'cause you might encounter what real consorship looks like. Unlike the EU, Thailand actually has censorship laws.
Doesn't happen.
It might be better and cheaper to try to improve the place you live one step at the time. This assumes you live in the EU, there are worse places for which this might not hold.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2f...
- 318
0 31
Too close. They will try again.
This is a copyright reform that needs to be adopted (its main purpose is to reduce inconsistencies in copyright laws across EU countries), and the fight is against two very specific articles (11 and 13) in the current version of it, through which there was an attempt at doing something bad for the Internet.
That doesn't mean that the entire copyright reform is just rotten to the core. You'll notice that nobody asked for the entire thing to be abolished, just for those two articles to disappear.
It's really amazing how people have to keep these idiots that are _supposed to_ be there to guard our interests in check.
As long as parties are allowed to accept contributions, things like this will happen. It should be absolutely forbidden to give any politician any money--both while campaigning and in case of victory. That way they would actually work for us and not corporations.
I don't think so, if we keep fighting we can win this. I for one plan to keep applying pressure to members of the legal committee.
Realistic optimism is not a cause for complacency. But we must also recognize that this is battle we can win, as to not give up without a fight. For all the faults of our democracies let's recognize that it worked today :)
I have a similar attitude to the US Federal government and why I think state rights are supreme. You lose economies of scale, but gain a distributed and hard(er) to corrupt system.
IMO concentration of power merely means that you need to be more careful with it. The EU will rarely be critized for standardizing boring regulation.
I keep thinking that in the post brexit world maybe the EU should strive away from controversial topics for a few years. But I could be wrong :)
It's time to change business models and evolve. Destroying the internet just to protect some profits should not be an option. Make subventions from states to newspapers illegal. Make scholar journals selling other peoples work in numeric form illegal.
Terminate google news and equivalent services. Journals don't deserve that free publicity.
That's not was this was at all. It was a change in the liability structure to make platforms liable for content published on their platform.
It was basically about news. European news organisations hate that people are getting news via Google and Facebook so they want to restrict that.
That's clearly not coincidental.
Not to mention that the newspapers themselves are reducing political coverage significantly to give room for the World Cup, so that those who still would like to pay attention have a reduced ability to do so.
It was Copyright > everything else > freedom of speech (granted I get that's a US phrase but you get my point).
Unlike the upload filter it's actually good for regular people (though not so much for certain corporations).
It is bad for people. It allows them to keep using bad, centralized, censoring, services without acknowledging the problems that causes. It prevents alternatives from springing up both indirectly because they can continue to make bad choices without consequence, and directly because the heavy new regulatory load makes start-ups harder and gives giant corps (and their giant legal teams) an advantage.
Additionally, you imply that regular people are not impacted. People are businesses. They don't stop being regular people when they run a business.
It's actually served me to know why some company I've never heard about has my personal data on file. It's empowered me to ask them what they have on me, and to tell them to fuck off with it if I don't like it.
GDPR is fucking amazing and as a business owner impacted by GDPR, I am proud to comply with it. Just as many people are proud to pay their taxes because of what is done with them.
Edit: Depressing to see people are downvoting real world experience in favour of FUD.
You also do realize that not everyone has options? That sometimes you don't have a choice if you want to achieve something, there's no alternative?
And what kind of logic is this? Should we get rid of health&safety regulations since people would just not go to the pizzerias where employees don't wash their hands after wiping their arses? And where did these "threats of violence" come from?
You also do realize that life's not an equal playing field and everyone is not equal in all aspects? I can't fix my car without paying someone to do it. Some people can't use the web properly. It's a tradeoff.
It's straightforward logic. You don't need to use Facebook. They have no obligation to provide you service. Even if you do use it there's no threat to your health or wellbeing (unlike bad food preparation hygine).
The threats of violence are from the government. If you don't pay their fines, say, if you refuse to be a slave and be forced into providing services to people on terms set by others, they will come at you with violence.
GDPR is bad. See what I did?
Anyone who thinks the GDPR is only costly to companies that were misusing data hasn't had much contact with the GDPR in the context of a business that's not absurdly simple (and most businesses aren't absurdly simple).
It didn't take long. Couple weeks of work. I did them myself.
Compliance documentation is what's needed: https://twitter.com/Adys/status/1014612906359615490
Edit: Depressing to see people are downvoting real world experience in favour of FUD.