EU copyright reform: the facts
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
FACT: The proposed new copyright rules will lead to direct surveillance of users’ activities online.
This and the recent 5 eyes document to require backdoors for all technology and services are the same. The surveillance state is coming. It is being bought. You are being sold.
But don't worry, they are doing this for our own security and safety. No one need watch the watchers.
The australian 5 eyes memo says they think they can / should be able to require services to report all of this output directly to them.
https://act.openmedia.org/savethelink-call
Or email by finding your MEP details on:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/search.html
More info on taking action can br found here (scroll a little):
The templates might be tedious, but they are there for people who would otherwise post some random flame or rant. Pages encouraging phone calls have scripted templates on them too.
I wrote to them last time this was voted on and expected zero replies (partly due to the late hour), but actually got 2 out of 13, one of which indicated they had actually taken a few seconds to read some of my words. I later read they had received "thousands" of messages on the subject. I can't imagine most of them getting anything close to even this small amount of attention.
Oh yeah, last campaign of the kind worked great. Members of Parliament really appreciated to have their mailbox (and their voicemail) mail-bombed by hundreds or thousands of such spam and reacted super well.
</sarcasm>
No, in fact, no matter which side and party they belonged to, it really pissed them off and turned them against what the spam advocated for. Many thought it was orchestrated by some GAFAM.
On the other hand, if you're an elected representative you better listen to your constituents. They are there to represent the people, not to decide in their place. Or, at least, that's the idea.
https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/
(edit: Not just the facts of course, also her opinion, shared by many organisations and individuals knowledgeable on how the Internet should work, eg. Vinton Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee, see https://www.eff.org/files/2018/06/13/article13letter.pdf).
There's so many problems with this.
It sets up the infrastructure for control of media. Is an image being shared that is unflattering to the current powers that be? Well, now we have a mandated system in place that can immediately pull that image from the web.
I don't think getting totalitarian control is the goal here, but it is the end result of it.
they are trying too hard to have their claws on every jurisdiction and be the international police that can prosecute everyone based on content piracy. And they are very close to that.
They already have control on north America and southeast Asia (via US, ChinaN and TPP agreements). Now they are "fixing" what they wanted im GDPR but lawmakers were too clever to see the tricks then, so they are being more explicit.
But eventually, what people will start doing is what we see in china. everyone in country A will do whatever it takes to consume content/interact with other people via sites in country B, which is not under the same jurisdiction of country A.
Hopefully people will still be able to live as they live today, and only yhe advertising market will suffer as brands now can't reliably reach one market or another. Maybe that fixes advertising too and force brands to sponsor services regardless of demographic. or maybe I am too optimistic and the IP conglomerates will win and people will not have access to any content that is not made and authorized by them.
- GDPR (Facebook/Google)
- Article 11 (Reddit)
- Article 13 (Github)
- Mandated EU Content on streaming providers (Netflix)
- EU Internet sales tax (Amazon)
The simple question begs: how many more regulations aimed at US companies are coming?
At this rate, the more regulations are created at fighting US companies. The number of internet startups and business located in the EU will one day cycle downward to zero.
What are they going to do next?
This is the proposal that Amazon should pay tax where the goods are sold, rather than hiding it in Luxembourg?
Article 13 is hardly an attack on Github, even if it may affect them. The EU loves US money and tech, and is happy to keep it (it seems it's happy to stay too). I'm totally against this proposal, but not because of anti-regulation dogma. That's rightly unpopular in prosperous and socialist Europe.
I've yet to be fined for not having a cookie popup on my blog :)
Edit:
And as someone living in the UK, I'm also wondering what the implications of this are for brexit[1]. Will the post-brexit interface between the EU and the UK w/r/t copyright be made even more complicated by this, with knock-on effects on digital service providers on each side?
[1] which I continue to oppose
We're well into "who knows?" territory, but what would definitely happen is the UK would lose any say over the EU rules. The UK isn't really large enough to be its own market for startups (unlike the EU and US), so we'd mostly end up using companies hosted in one or the other and obliged to follow their rules.
(Safe Harbour is probably a more interesting one to consider!)
Hence my request for an objective summary.
At least that's an easy question to answer: the member states.
A directive obliges member states to introduce local legislation to achieve a particular effect. Usually it's transcribed pretty closely, but some states may use their sovereignty to impose additional restrictions (if they're not precluded by the Directive, a different directive, or human rights law).
Generally if you want to speed up reading a Directive you can skip all the "Whereas" clauses, they're not binding but do specify the reasoning behind the directive.
[1.11.3] 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.
The controversial article (13) in the EU directive is exactly three paragraphs long. Quoting the article's title and first paragraph in full:
> Use of protected content by information society service providers storing and giving access to large amounts of works and other subject-matter uploaded by their users
> 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.
As you can see, there might be room to argue that one could remove a word here or there, or perhaps to avoid a euphemism or two, but to me it seems like it's about as plain text as legalese can be.
As an aside, and in stark contrast with what a lot of the UK press would have you believe, EU texts tend to be very human readable; particularly when you compare it to texts produced by other legislative bodies.
To illustrate, compare the EU directive in question:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
To e.g. the US' CLOUD act:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4943...
Or e.g. the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents act:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/pdfs/ukpga_19880...
I don't generally see eye to eye with libertarians (or whoever advocates for minimal interference of state), but out of touch laws like this are just the worst.
But it won't happen sooner than before majority of creators learn that copyright does not benefit them in any way.
We can teach them that by never paying for copyrighted things.
On the surface, of course, this would seem ridiculous. But we only have to examine how much cultural capital is employed to keep writers writing toward the money and controlled by editors, and ratings boards, etc. And the common consumer expects what they, the consumer, to always be delivered unto with exactly that which they claim to desire. Under the monetary system reproductive advantage slates toward those who accrue capital. However remove that, and the 'shock value' of 'independent artistic work' becomes the most viable remaining path to mate attraction.
So, remove the money, and the only artists, writers, etc, who remain, are the ones that the mass of consumers despise as 'experimental' and 'weird', etc.
And given that humanity is pretty much by definition a story species, the resulting effects on society as a whole, with such a major hit to the mytho-poetic infrastructure that undergirds any society, might be very interesting. Most likely some government or wealth-backed cultural production engine will emerge in the vacuum, however, the question might be whether it will do so fast enough.
Disney could operate private theatres that threw out and banned people with recording devices, but how could home distribution function.
For popular work, we are back at the pre-copyright world of patronage.
Popular appeal might lead certain rare individuals to monetary compensation in academia, but this, I would say, will be country and culturally dependent. In France, for example, I might see it, but not the United States. And it might lead to a certain amount of tribal-production to sustain the replication of certain cultural norms, but in order for that to e so the trend of production and consumption previously adhered to in these industries (from the consumer viewpoint) will have to be reverse: the consumer will be paying patronage in advance of the creation of the work which will then be mechanically mass reproduced upon release. However, I think a smaller amount of people than currently consumptive model of media will be as likely to switch wholly to a 'pig-in-a-poke'-model. Even with things like netflix, the primary draw has always been that which pre-exists, that which the consumer already knows to be available, and its primary value is not weighted on what necessarily 'might' be produced in the future. People might be willing to fund such models through 'micro transaction', however, any individual funding themselves, thus, would necessarily require a proportionally larger base of funders; however this would have the function of keeping the cultural mytho-poetic framework in check, producing what commonly referred to as 'the lowest common denominator'. Also, however, even if someone were to make a living in this manner, they might not what to in that, no matter what survivable level of income they may derive, a Disney would then, through the sheer economy of their scale, be able to transform that, now mechanically reproduced work into something distributed through the private theatre system at no cost for the acquiring of the source material. This alone may be a sufficient psychological demotivator for many, and present a common source of burnout (thus requiring a change in employment), or even an obstacle to many taking up the profession at all.
The question remains, if the so-called creator is likely to get no monetary compensation, and little in the way of social capital anyway, what will induce them to create any works besides those they want to create. The problem is that 'artistry' in the mytho-poetics of most western countries attains a somewhat religious significance, but the most of its practitioners (or at least those who mange to make their primary living at it) would leave so-called creative fields for greener pastures; it's a job.
(I suppose I should add here that I am very much against to current copyright system as it stands now, though I realize my reply might indicate otherwise. I do, however, become aggravated when the attitudes of so-called consumers amounts to a type a slavery where they want what they want [produced but want it for free, resembles too much those companies that have baited artists and writer with 'exposure' for far too long. As it stands, what is said about the disruptive potential of the internet aside, most writers and artists make what they do (and paltry sums at that) by effectively signing over their copyrights in perpetuity to what amounts to intellectual property holding companies. So the law may say the author owns it, but to see anything from it (in the vast majority of cases) they have to give that right away, and then so-called consumers come along and claim (purely to pinch pennies) that authors should relinquish even (and presenting no alternative) that is, to me, as aggravating as the media conglomerates who do the same.)
- The prepayment model was quite successful in the past; authors like Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens and Dostoevsky made a living from producing novels in serialized form[1]. This model fits well also with TV shows, podcasts, and potentially video games.
- Plenty of content is already funded by volunteer donations and ads (although, personally, I abhor the latter more than copyright).
- You don't necessarily need copyright to have protection; contracts exist. It's doubtful the competing private theater networks would just copy each other's movies, rather than reach a legal agreement not to do so.
- For certain types of works, live performances provide a funding model that doesn't rely on copyright. It's not copyright that keeps people going to concerts.
In regards to contracts, I think we only need to look at history: the case comes to mind wether agents of Thomas Edison saw a screening of the film 'Voyage to the Moon' and bribed a theatre operator to get a copy of the film made, so it was Edison, showcasing it in his private theatre chains (he owned an enormous amount of patents in motion picture technology, which is why Hollywood is movie capital of the United States, to get beyond the legal reach of Edison in New York), thereby having extracted the commercial value of the film prior to the director managing to bring it to the United States. Still, this leaves out the entire possibility of home distribution (outside of the most egregious contracts and locked-down hardware (so far as I can see), which, looking at the way things are going, may be the case under the current system as well).
I will completely agree as it regards to live performance. But that is a very small segment of so-called creative work. And even then we are still left with the perennial problem of the lion's share of the resultant capital going not to the actual performers, to the investor class. But, then again, copyright or no, maybe we'll always have that as the touchstone of commonality no matter what social, political, or artist upheaval does or doesn't come to fruition.
Yet more than 90% of the work consumed by (pretty much everyone) is commercial in origin. Even those producing news segments and documentaries for PBS are doing so because they are paid to do so.
I'm not saying people won't write things like Wikipedia articles. But if the value for others (a given corporation, for example) exceeds the social capital they generate for themselves, if they just feed a machine for no benefit, expending more and more of themselves in the process, only to watch a Disney, say, become far more well known for it (thus increasing the desirability of mating with the owners and board members and rich directors involved) why would any so-called rational person commit to such? I doubt all those wiki contributors would feel good if if, somehow, all that content were retroactively re-licensed (or more accurately de-licensed) and incorporated into a commercial, subscription-based encyclopedia. Yes, in one sense, everything that's on Wikipedia would remain as always, as available as always, but I cannot see it as having gone untainted after such a move.
True, a certain proof might be found in the uses of the MIT and 2-clause BSD licenses (and their kind), but still, it seems to me, even in those cases (taking note that they exist in veritable islands of copyleft and proprietary software) the social benefits (mainly in their ability to contrast themselves with the aforementioned alternatives) allows either the potential gain of social capital that can be parlayed both in personal relationships and employment (both having their obvious connection with attraction of a mate based on the expression of extended phenotypes) or, alternatively, such software is created purely for person use and released to the wider world because the commodification and distribution of computer technology makes it trivial and cheap to invest in the possibility of acquiring even minimal social capital, and should none come it, of course, the producer is out nothing, so there, relatively, likely only the possibility of gain.
Even our own present conversation falls within this realm, just as, according to the law (of course, I presume your geographical location to likely be somewhere within a country affected by the Berne Convention, though I will admit the possibility of error here) we are automatically granted ownership over our respective words, either collection of phrases walled off from the other in a way, possibly, and ironically, reflecting our respective mental dispositions on this issue, and just as the terms of service for this sight allow its owners to store and serve them unto any who enter.
Spammy junk, bad movies, terrible TV, is the common binding thread of cultural narrative and the mytho-poetic framework (a phrase I have type too many time I think), but, in any regard, it creates and reinforces who we are. Even those who decry it, in doing so, define themselves in relation to it and in its terms. So...long live the new flesh, I guess.
Easily more than 10% of what I read has non-commercial origin, like your comment for example.
I wonder if media consumption is like counting calories. They do say that (due to various factors) it is impossible for consumers to do so accurately.
Interestingly, can you truly know if my post is commercial in origin. Maybe I am some kind of covert influencer, paid to sow any number of memetic seeds. (Perhaps I'm not even a person as such, at least, not a flesh and blood one, but merely a rather limited Markov Generator.)
(Though, it isn't---at least, not the first part---I'm very much not getting paid money for this.) Which is not to say, however, that I am not getting paid. That is to say, without these posts, I don't exist in this environment. My post, like yours and everyone else's here, is our ongoing construction of both the accounts which contain our social assets (assets that extend even beyond this realm) as well as the social assets themselves, that is our identities in our own minds, and each variant of that identity that exists within each reader of each post we submit. (Facebook highlight reals, various forms of virtual signaling in the comment section for news articles, etc would fall into this category. Though, in a way, this in an interesting model for post-capitalist future, in that, baring those who are an such services for business promotion, Facebook, Twitter, etc are all commercial endeavors where users churn-up content for no commercial compensation, ultimately ultimately creating the state in which these entities can acrue capital. And even though it doesn't in the same way as those entities, HN itself (and the social reputations generated on it) are deeply intertwined with combinator as a whole.) But those identities are also backed by copyright, interestedly enough. And I would claim your ownership of this identity (at least so far as it can be owned, that is the specifics of each post) is intrinsic, no matter to what degree you decry copyright. For example, without such, you collective posts could be taken by anyone and edited in any fashion they desired, thus crafting any public version of you they wanted. It might be argued that if keep libel and defemation laws around, that that wouldn't happen, but doesn't that just become a kind of backdoor copyright? A so-called creator could claim that no matter how the work were modified it would be prejudicial against them and that, even, perhaps, that distributing it to unapproved entities would be also be so (though, that likely is stretch).
Also, I think that there is a disparity in, shall we say, length. That is to say, users are, in general, willing to trade effort that raises capital for an entity wholly other for themselves, in exchange for the opportunity for the construction and maintenance of social capital. And we can see that as a fairly textbook value transaction. The question is how far it can be pushed. The rights already granted to entities such as Facebook would, I would argue, if they tried to pursue it, that the user agreements of such entities grant enough leeway for them to employ a large portion of their generated content anyway they wanted, not just the re-serving of it and the cataloging of it. So let's imagine they do so, using such data for say, effectively, crowdsourced filmmaking, or some such. At what point would the user base become dissatisfied with this? That is, at what point does the value of the transaction shift? So the overall question becomes, while users are willing to generate, in exchange for a certain amount of social capital, a few memes and one-liners, and the typical length of a post on HN, are they willing to do so for substantial work (that is to say, would the typical user be willing to give Facebook one or more 80,000 100,000, 200,000 word books with all the result capital flowing, then, to that entity?). And we can extend this to full-length film, etc. Would anyone even want to create a three-minute music video under such circumstances? (And I don't mean this question facetiously.)
I do know those who create (16-bit game assets, for example) and release those creations under the terms of CC0, being as close to public domain as possible, though don't even think that is close enough, but I still can't help from wondering how they would feel if those works were consistently used in multi-billion dollar grossing games without even mention of their name (unless we are going to retain moral rights from copyright, that is). Considering the actual reactions of many people when they found out their creative commons material was used by corporations, rather than purely 'the community', it does lead me to believe that people aren't thinking of even these licenses (again, all of them backed explicitly and only possible because of copyright) in terms of the whole of the world, the actual world.
What we have to keep in mind about the post-copyright world is that it doesn't start from zero. Every media company that exist today, will still exist with their accrued capital in the post-copyright tomorrow. To be sure, they would take many hits (and I would not say otherwise), but just in size alone they will continue over every solitary self-publisher.
And I do not doubt that people will make things. It is the things that they do make that I do question. In such a world where only the actual of social capital could exist (an impossibility, I obviously state, at least under any circumstances the human race has ever known) it might tend towards mass appeal, but even then, why would anyone go wide (except in the case of the most megalomaniacal) when instead they could concentrate their efforts on fewer and more likely targets of localized social acceptance? But, to be honest, I don't know if that question could even be answered. But the more concrete question, at least in my view, is: if all the so-called creator gains in the social capital aspect (and even that is up for question, as if Disney makes a version of it, everyone will know it from Disney), but that is all the so-called creator gains, and they repeatedly watch as others raise themselves within the social order capital accrued from being based on these works and their own social capital accrued from the wider distribution of the works (remember the reaches and assets of those established companies will be larger), repeatedly watching this transference, how long are such individuals going to last? And I will repeat that I cannot see any rational person doing so (or at least what we call rational). So it remains for (except for the few exceptions that will most likely arise in any system (as do the Stephen Kings and J K Rowlings in this one) and those workers who would operate within, perhaps, my previously imaged theatre system, though even they might not amount to much, merely stitching together garments from pre-existing public domain properties based on the tastes of the audience, or maybe even replaced altogether my sufficiently advanced Markov Generators (there's already one that can write passages from 50 Shades of Gray)), so it rests with either the insane or the driven (and driven here has to refer to artistry driven, the ones most likely to create so-called 'weird' stuff, simply for the fact that being a commercial entity and doing things that aren't 'hip' weird, is the road to obscurity or penury, though not necessarily without critical acclaim, but one eat critical acclaim unless that social reputation can be traded in on (ala, we get a lot of creative writing instructors).
(But, of course, that is only my view from my experiences within the related communities.)
*edit communities, not communists
The smaller platforms often use under the hood Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or equivalent.
Probably the copyright verification is going to be added at that level, and hopefully will be transparent to the platforms built on top of those cloud services.
So hopefully, this will not impact smaller SaaS companies as much as it might look.
... this would not impact smaller SaaS companies ...
This isn't a law yet and I don't think most people want it to become one.
That said, I disagree that this isn't a terrible burden for the small guy. Even if it would be trivial to set up, all the other downsides remain and it leads to lock-in in the form of dependence on large companies who have implemented this.
More importantly, why do we want this? What benefits does this bring? I don't see many for the ordinary person.
Maybe it could shift liability? So if someone posts the lyrics to a song and Sony sues them for 50,000 euro could they argue that it is the fault of the ISP for not filtering their post properly?
This is a longshot, but I was trying very hard to think of some way in which this law doesn't screw over individuals for the benefit of large corporations.
These companies will then have the definitive say on what is posted online and what isn't. The Chinese will be jealous of our new censorship machine.
To my mind, it's impossible to take part in the debate until you've realised that your position is a point of view; that other have a different point of view; and that compromise is going to be necessary.
Simple distraction and switch and playing into the mindset that Canada has somehow ties with Europe and is therefore 'good'.
It's amazing how they get away with these things.
If only one side is compromising, it is not a compromise.