What is the end game for Reddit if this does pass? Will it just block European users?
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.
Now, the thought about "the EU attempting to regulate the internet" is rather myopic. EU is not initiating anything, the EU is simply continuing a process which was started long ago.
This is part of the same copyright enforcement continuum which ("long" ago) caused the US organization MPAA to work with the US government to exert political pressure on Sweden to shut down the The Pirate Bay (BitTorrent tracker).
The argument then was The Pirate Bay was helping people distribute copyright-protected content while getting money from this process.
Now, there are companies which do substantially the same thing: users upload copyright protected content to the service, the service disseminates the content back to users while the service is monetized e.g. with advertisements. In some cases the content is individual pictures, in some cases music tracks or albums or even entire movies.
Now, either this mechanism as a whole is OK or it is not OK. The EU is basically saying that the mechanism is not OK within EU regardless of whether the company is from USA or not.
If you observe this development over time, it has been about tightening of copyright enforcement everywhere. From that perspective it makes sense to tick-tock two of the biggest players in turn, to tighten the law in one, then make the other one follow.
I hope I'm wrong. Looking forward to see Mickey Mouse in public domain.
Oh, and you don't want mickey mouse in the public domain. We already have characters like him in it, Betty Boop and Max Fleischer versions of superman are in it, and you can go buy a DVD for under $10 usa that has hundreds of public domain cartoons.
What happens when something is put in the public domain is often no one has any incentive to care for, advertise, curate, or promote the characters. Yes, you can view the content for free, but it's almost always done in a basic or slapdash form, maybe a bad vhs rip or ebook with scanning errors. You often very rarely see actual new works based on the properties, because no company has an existing interest to keep the brand fresh.
Honestly copyright is the only reason some characters even endure. Woody Woodpecker would have died out had lantz not sold the shorts to universal, for example.
I do. I don't care about Mickey Mouse per se, but I don't think copyrights should be indefinite, or substantially longer than an average human lifespan. Mickey Mouse is 90 years old. Its creator has been dead for 52 years.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether that should happen now (90 years after creation), in 10 years (100 years after creation), two years ago (50 years after the death of the author), or some other roughly similar timeframe, but creative works should pass into the commons after the creator has had a reasonable opportunity to profit from them.
The EU has put out a series of regulations and proposals including this, GDPR, and the proposed terrorist content regulation. It looks like a pattern to me. I know the EU is not the only government trying to do this sort of thing, but so far, it seems to have had the most impact.
This isn't just about copyright. It seems to me that it's a popular opinion in Europe that American internet companies have too much power, and the EU ought to rein them in any way it can.
The ultimate goal is to lay ground work for filtering/shadow banning political content. But that will happen slowly, not overnight.
This helps big tech players at the little guys' expense. Big companies can build their own content filters. Small companies can't, and are forced to buy content filtering software or services from the big companies.
There's a big difference between a DMCA system where the content host has the responsibility to take down copyrighted content in a reasonable time frame, while having safe harbor protection in cases where content gets through, versus a "non-safe harbor" law where you literally cannot allow any copyrighted content _on upload_, or you can be held liable. It would be impossible to decide who owns what, even for Google, and so they would need to have some other system that is not user generated content (who knows what).
User-generated content is the life blood of the web, it's why everyone can communicate and we have this new world, we simply need it I think. I really disagree with others who try to frame this as if Google and Reddit are simply another company trying to defend their turf. This is a real blunder for the EU and completely misinformed IMO
And one wonders why the serious players only roll the their eyes when “the internet community” is mentioned.
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.
My guess is it would mean things like news publishers would send copies of the main text to reddit and reddit would be required to filter out comments that contain some significant chunk of them unless there's some agreement made. Currently most paywalled articles have the entire text pasted into a comment within.
In other words, I think the motivations here have very little to do with author's rights and everything to do with lobbying for European business.
That moat is so big that even EU companies can't cross it. Our hands are tied even more than foreign companies.
But yes, I think you are right and the intended goal will be a wide miss.
Is the EU going to go after member nation companies? Yeah, probably, if it wants legislation to have teeth.