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Comment by VBprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

The new Copyright Directive may have that effect though.

GDPR is worse, actually. Both laws are making site owners liable for hosting certain types of content (personal information and copyrighted materials, respectively). However automatically detecting copyrighted materials is relatively straightforward compared but automatically detecting personal information is probably impossible.

> However automatically detecting copyrighted materials is relatively straightforward

Sure, that's easy: everything is copyrighted. The difficult part is determining whether the uploader can legally share the copyrighted material, which is just as likely to prove impossible to automate with accuracy and precision as the detection of personal information.

How would that have that effect?

I'm no expert, but from what I've heard, site owners can be held liable for hosting copyrighted material now. If you're running a site with lots of user generated content, it could be difficult to distinguish what is 100% user made vs copied from somewhere else.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

It's time to start copyright check startup.

You are absolutely correct. This law could have such effect.

More realistically, this is a problem that has no easy technical solution that originates from a law that still isn't adopted.

If I were an owner of such platform, I wouldn't worry too much about it now. In a year... maybe.

Even more realistically: is there any reason to assume any of this stuff will ever be enforced, let alone enforced against obscure forums?

Here in the UK, these sorts of laws have had, as far as I know, zero enforcement.

http://nocookielaw.com/ https://silktide.com/the-stupid-cookie-law-is-dead-at-last/ https://silktide.com/dear-ico-this-is-why-web-developers-hat...

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