The EU Copyright Directive: What Redditors in Europe Need to Know

> They need to do the unthinkable: Block all access from the EU.

This is not a solution. This is just allowing beauracrats the power to make us voluntarily erect borders in cyberspace where none are required.

Blocking entire geographic regions is the worst possible response.

I live in the EU and I fully support this. Youtube should block all access from EU, as well as Reddit and others. The legislation is insane.

> They need to do the unthinkable: Block all access from the EU.

This seems like a deeply cowardly move. The courageous and virtuous move is to simply ignore the law and continue as usual - to challenge the state to do what, if we all unite in support of each other and our basic freedoms, it will be unable to do.

The actually did that but it disappeared after a few hours https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/9yrbgb/so_this_happe...

The only effect it would have would be polarizing European users against those companies.

Even better might be to force all the EU into a single thread about the legislation. Then Reddit users can whip other Reddit users into a frenzy, as Reddit does best.

Or it might devolve into political debate with an unhealthy mix of bot generated content and trolls.

Or for some websites, simply ignore the EU regulations.

You can ignore other countries laws. You don't have to bow down to the EU.

Edit I don't get why people hate this, but it is a reality.

> If Reddit and other similar sites want to make a point, a banner won't be enough. They need to do the unthinkable: Block all access from the EU.

What they need to do is work together in a unified manner like the media and the politicians have done. Instead, they are bickering and fighting against each other while the journalists and politicians form a unified front against freedom and free speech.

> Legislators are relying on a population who is too distracted to care what they're doing.

Exactly. They rely on a lazy populace and of course relentless anti-tech propaganda from news organizations.

So what do we do about big countries that does military and political pressure on smaller countries enforcing their copyright laws? The Pirate Bay comes to mind, as does Kim Dotcom. I'm sure there are more but I'm not that interested in the movie garbage from Hollywood to keep up.

That the EU starts doing copyright law like this is due to pressure and lobbying mainly from USA.

> Reddit ... the websites where the content is made by users.

Except for /r/WorldNews or /r/news or /r/programming or ...

The phenomenon certainly exists where hundreds of people will debate an article without ever reading more than the title and maybe seeing a picture. Sometimes the entire article will be copied into the discussion, even. Whether this phenomenon causes harm and requires correction is unclear.

I really don’t think we’d be missing much if these websites were shut down. In fact, it might be a good thing.

that would be a rash decision. But i would like to see twitter move in that direction: make all tweets copyrighted, and require a fee every time they appear in newspapers.

Yeah, that's not going to happen.

Is there actually an alternative to sites like Reddit blocking EU users if the new law is passed?

Best I can think of based on what I know about the law is that perhaps links can't be active for EU users until the domain they go to has an agreement with the site and goes onto the whitelist. This would need to apply to both comments and stories, based on my what I know.

Would that work?

Or better, get the IPs of EU parliaments and block them.

So linking to an image in-place is fine, but reuploading to Imgur is not?

Morally bankrupt? Copyright is not a moral issue, it is just a several centuries old regulation created by people who could never have envisioned something like the Internet. The effort to turn copyright into a moral issue is nothing more than a tactic employed by copyright-based industries in their desperate bid to stay relevant without changing their business models.

> and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit

Very often, when a gif taken from a video is shared, for example, the top comment will be a link to the source video. In even more cases, such a comment is near the top of the thread. That absolutely benefits the content creator.

The sort of images most commonly posted to reddit are screengrabs from movies or games with text added for humorous effect. This sort of use has traditionally been classed as fair use under copyright law.

Penalizing reddit for doing so would not result in more revenue for the creators of the source material.

I believe the way copyright is structured and enforced today is the moral issue here.

Let's not forget why Hollywood is in Hollywood after all.

I really can't be bothered to defend platforms like Reddit or Facebook from directives or laws, but what I do care and hold dear is the user experience that will suffer greatly if the directives pass as proposed. In the end, it's the users who will bear the brunt of legislation like this by losing access and tools to communicate, and that is the crux of this issue, legislation rarely does what it's primary intention is and ends up harming the public the most. After all, laws are very blunt objects to deal with soft matters because they are enforced by fines and penalties and weakest members, usually individuals, are least prepared to defend their rights, companies can hire lawyers or even shift focus to something else. Users will lose everything.

> almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy

You mean copyright infringement? You know there's an infinite amount of debate as to how much copyright protection costs society vs its actual benefits (most of the said benefits go to big cartels rather than individual creators anyway).

> almost every image

Really? You have any source to prove your extraordinary claim?

> very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit,

Erm... ever heard of publicity?

I totally agree with the sentiment. You can't take content from the world and host it without giving something back. A newspaper reporting on a funeral? pay the descendants a fee. Reporting on celebs? pay another fee. Reporting on science? pay the scientists a fee. We forget though that the media is also another form of aggregator. They write about the news, but don't create them. Whether one sort of aggregator is more profitable than the other depends on the cost of the writing and the breadth of the audience.

Explain the difference in hosting content on a server vs downloading and hosting it local to be rendered by a browser ?

The number of people in the audience its being shared with ? If I show someone what I have locally I have doubled that audience.

Remember the double a penny math ?

If everyone shared a photo with 1 person effectively doubling the sharing, in 40 days you are going to have the entire world covered.

The entire premise of IP and copyright is broken when it is so cheap the common method of presenting material is to copy it and render it locally.

This is awfully dogmatic, and I'm sad to see it on HN.

Your arguments would effectively turn the internet into nothing more than a text messaging service seeing as Google indexing and mirroring images is also "piracy".

P.S. - Maybe we should ditch the old MPAA/RIAA propaganda lingo? No one is talking about robbing a sea faring vessel.

> I mean, almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy

No it's not. It's called fair use. As long as it is changed or altered in some way as a means of commentary/criticism/etc.

Using your logic, everything is piracy, even "original" content.

That's not the problem. The problem is that the law wants the webpage owners to be liable for copyright infringements from whatever content users generate.

Most threads on reddit are either links to an original source or text threads where users are providing the content. How is this theft?

> almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy

This statement seems questionable and needs to be backed up by statistics. Looking at the front-page, the most entertaining items are original content contributed by the users. Clearly, piracy is happening too, perhaps in the total uploads more so than what reaches the front-page, but I distrust the notion that this is associated with substantial economic loss. And in the utilitarian analysis of the problem it matters whether it is substantial because of the implications on freedom of speech that may come from an automated filter.

> every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy, and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit

Almost every time I stumble upon a picture I really like I tineye it to find more works of the same author and a hi-res version perhaps. Some times this leads to discovering amazing artists on resources like DeviantArt and popularizing them everywhere continuously and even considering buying a print. I can see no reason how sharing a low to medium resolution version of a picture even without mentioning the author means any harm to the author but in cases when they prefer to keep their work secret. In fact I believe forcing everybody to contact the author to request a formal approval is much more harm to them and their profits.

By this standard, HN users constantly indulge in blatant piracy, through encouragement and use of outline.com to bypass paywalls.

The problem is the liability will now fall on the host rather than the uploader.

exactly, I don't understand how a company like reddit could promote this FALSE idea. Links are not covered. Why do they do this?

Are you saying “so what if Reddit does not exist?” Is that your argument?

I don't think it's "a good thing" that they're making it harder to run online services.

I agree that the likely outcome is that decentralised systems get better, and I agree that that outcome would be a good thing. I still don't think the end justifies the means, and would rather see politicians just leave the internet alone: https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

On Wikipedia I read:

"The proposal makes explicit that this does not include private cloud storage services, non-profit encyclopedias (such as Wikipedia), non-profit educational or scientific repositories, nor a variety of other cases."

The directive says:

"The definition of an online content sharing service provider under this Directive targets only online services which play an important role on the online content market by competing with other online content services, such as online audio and video streaming services, for the same audiences. The services covered by this intervention are those the main or one of the main purposes of which is to provide access to a large amount of copyright -protected content uploaded by their users with the purpose of obtaining profit therefrom, either directly or indirectly, by organising it and promoting it in order to attract more audiences. Organising and promoting content involves for example indexing the content, presenting it in a certain manner and categorising it, as well as using targeted promotion on it. The definition does not include services whose main purpose is not to provide access to copyright protected content with the purpose of obtaining profit from this activity. These include, for instance, electronic communication services within the meaning of Regulation 2015/2120/EU, including internet access providers, as well as providers of cloud services which allow users, to upload content for their own use, such as cyberlockers, or online marketplaces whose main activity is online retail and not giving access to copyright protected content. Nor does this definition cover websites which store and provide access to content for non-for-profit purposes, such as online encyclopaedias, scientific or educational repositories or open source software developing platforms which do not store and give access to content for profit making purposes. In order to ensure the high level of copyright protection and to avoid the possible application of the liability exemption mechanism provided for in this Directive, this Directive should not apply to services the main purpose of which is to engage in or to facilitate copyright piracy."

I'm the CEO of a company (LBRY) that deals directly with these issues. I'm approaching six figures in legal bills and have spent hundreds of hours on this issue.

Here's the truth: no one knows. Not a single person. No one knows how even existing laws like the DMCA and CDA in the US apply to decentralized platforms. E.g. The DMCA and CDA both Utilize the term "service provider" - who is a service provider in a decentralized network? Under existing law, a service provider is supposed to at least be running a server.

This doesn't cover the European issues, but here's a ten page memo on this topic prepared pro bono by Cardozo Law on how the CDA/DMCA apply to my company: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2oudj04lCTJOFZ5V1g5dG9tR2N...

It is substantially similar to memos I've spent far more money on.

I think they ought to tread very carefully and very lightly. Imagine if there was an internet where you can't just remove something. Sure, you can see the IP address of the people hosting/distributing the material, but there are numerous ways to disguise that.

Suddenly, via P2P everyone becomes their own client _and_ server, and the _only_ way to remove content is to ensure everyone in the pool no longer has it.

Good luck with that.

Decentralized will then be the target of the next regulation. They are too small to matter atm.

According to Wikipedia, Reddit itself has 230 employees. Advance Publications is private, though; I can't find numbers.

It's a rather small company, but it's in the top 20 Websites worldwide, top 10 in the US.

i don't know a single other forum where you can converse with "EU citizens" other than /r/europe . I also follow other local reddits to find out the odd news that are not typically reported. And reddit is fun, entertaining, that's its value proposition and is based on the community, with posts being generally just a conversation starter. I would need an alternative to it.

I also bet a lot of publications are going to miss the traffic it gives them.

The content in general might have become less "deep", but the quality subreddits, posts, contributors are still there, just in total they make up a smaller percentage. At least this is my impression.

Link target also (almost always) make money when visiting the site. They want the publicity from all sources. Nobody small lives on direct traffic.

Cool i guess, Reddit will lose money, doesn't affect me or anything. What is the point of this disruption though? Nobody gains from it, it's like "if i can't have it, nobody can have it".

Reddit allows image and video uploads nowadays by users.

How is Reddit supposed to filter all of it?

Upload filters ala Google’s ContentId. The impact will be similar to Youtube in the short term. Since Reddit is GIFs not audio it will be topical things like FIFA replays etc.

The ultimate goal is to lay ground work for filtering/shadow banning political content. But that will happen slowly, not overnight.

I hope so... among many other more significant things on the web, and I say that as a current EU citizen - the people creating these laws need to see them fail hard.

Having the best intentions is not enough when defining laws for complex technology with broad application, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of it and the scope of it's reach - they clearly do not.

One thing I could imagine happening if the EU's attempts to regulate the internet become too onerous is that companies like reddit would simply pull any legal presence out of Europe and ignore European law. That would leave the EU with only nuclear options for enforcement like a Great Firewall of Europe or trade sanctions against the US.

I think the image is pretty clear, EU users will no longer be able to use Reddit.

Internet users in general have become used to unlimited free content and use. Unfortunately free platforms are paid for with ads and the revenue per user, with the exception of a few behemoths, is very slim. It is pretty easy to put things in the red if you decrease the value of ads and increase general legal compliance costs. If your bank account isn’t full of money, it is over when derived providers shut down your accounts.

There have been a lot of accusations made about companies which have chosen to block EU users. The companies choosing to do so are optimistic that they may be able to open to EU users in the future. They respect the laws of the EU and expect the system to continue to exist for some time. Unlike, say, a large number of countries where the sitting head of government could be publicly hung and no one would be surprised.

Probably German media "giants" like Springer and Bertelsmann. They don't get their shit done and are losing mind share each year, so they are panicking. However their influence on politics is still strong, therefore they can pull off stuff like that.

I hope so. I'd love for evil companies who violate people's privacy (such as Reddit) to abandon EU, as it would allow for good and privacy-focused sites to gain a larger marketshare.

GDPR is good

Most likely it won't as it only hosts text, and links + individual words is ok

(the reason I'm less worried about Art 11 is two fold: first is that I do agree that content scraping like Google News should be under agreement and that it will be worse for the news orgs than they think it will be)

HN doesn't fall under EU jurisdiction, so even if they did violate it, I'm doubt it would be enforced.

I've seen quite a few paywalled articles posted, where someone else posts a link to "theoutline.com" to bypass paywalls, or just straight out copy/paste the article text.