Article 13 is almost finished and will change the internet as we know it
juliareda.eu
juliareda.eu
"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit"
That's actually a lot of limitation. From my understanding: "organise and promote" means it is not simple hosting, and "in order to make a profit" excludes organizations like Wikimedia Commons and "large amounts" most likely excludes smaller websites like fan sites, and "uploaded by their users" exclude search engines.
It is clearly meant to target a form of abuse that is much too common in the "internet as we know it". It is mostly apparent in sites like PornHub. They live by monetizing content they don't have the rights for, and they use their status as a platform as a way to stay legal. I think YouTube admitted that in the early days, they voluntarily turned a blind eye to copyright infringement as a way to grow ahead of their competition.
It is unfair to legitimate companies who do their best to make sure their content really is original or properly licensed.
And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet.
As for the potential for abuse, remember that the article isn't finished, it has yet to be completed, ratified, and tried. Public debate is important and we shall not let everything pass, but IMHO, the spirit is good.
All these things are very interpretable and can be the root to abuse and mistakes.
- an Internet platform
- that organizes and promotes large amounts of posts
- which are copyright-protected works uploaded by their users
- in order to make a profit as it is an advertisement for y combinator.
What is 'meant' is irrelevant. Important is the letter of the law. Besides, 'meant' is a very dangerous word when used by politicians as jaded as the EU folks. It is a way to whitewash unpopular laws, and make them look reasonable when they are in fact the complete opposite.
Further for your info: Hacker News does not "need a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie", it only needs to take responsibility of you commit copyright infringement by doing so.
I’d happily let Hacker News go if it means other such platforms go with it.
CENTURION: Has what, sir?
PILATE: Spiwit.
CENTURION: Yes. He did, sir.
PILATE: No, no. Spiwit, siw. Um, bwavado. A touch of dewwing-do.
CENTURION: Oh. Ahh, about eleven, sir.
PILATE: So, you dare to waid us.
BRIAN: To what, sir?
PILATE: Stwike him, Centuwion, vewy woughly!
slap
The movie studio could now hold HN liable.
Well, except that HN is not under EU jurisdiction, so it could probably choose to ignore EU court decisions against it. Bigger platforms of course won't have that luxury, so they'd need to come up with some way of limiting or avoiding that liability... or maybe just blocking EU users.
He's using the quote to make an unrelated point. This wouldn't be considered copyright infringement anywhere you have an impartial judiciary.
Why?
I'll take as a given that many platforms are profiting from copyrighted content uploaded by users, but I very much doubt that the copyright owners would secure any of those profits for themselves if the platforms in question were driven out of existence.
Do you believe otherwise? If so, why?
There's just one large company that decided to block EU visitors: Tribune Publishing[0]. Yes, them blocking Europe is bad. Them owning so many local newspapers that this decision even makes an impact is a bigger problem.
I'm not saying that they're the only ones blocking Europe, but I am saying that we wouldn't think of it to be as wide spread if it weren't for Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and LA Times (among others).
Examples:
* Tribune have troncked Europe because their data control is jazzy.
* Google should really tronc China - fight the Firewall!
They are not blocked. They have chosen to take their services offline because they don’t think changing their business model such that it no longer depends on aggressively tracking their users is worthwhile or cost-effective. Which is fine by me imho.
I don't agree that if a business chooses not to operate in a country, because it's unwilling to spend the money required to comply with the country's laws, that that is equivalent to censorship.
Another person's personal information is not protected speech.
I was fine with that transaction. In fact, I would rather have them sell my data instead of charging money.
Consumers have a choice on whether or not they want to go to these sites, it's not like they are forced to give away their personal information to news sites.
I would say the GDPR blocking news sites is a net negative because it denies consumers the choice to read news stories.
And I always thought (back in my more naïve days) that I read the site in exchange for being advertised to. Point being, the exact details of the transaction were never shown to the visitors. GDPR fixes that by forcing companies to state the terms of this transaction explicitly, and actually ask the visitors if they're willing to participate in it.
GDPR isn't blocking any sites, it's only disallowing a very particular way of getting users to give up their data and then monetizing that data. Nobody is entitled to their business model working forever, and some companies prefer to shut off a large segment of their market instead of updating their business model. It's their choice.
*metaphors can get quite silly
Self blocking in response to a law to avoid the penalties under the law is being blocked by the law.
That's all there is to it. GDPR isn't banning news sites, or other companies; it's banning a very particular set of antisocial business practices.
The problem isn't only adjusting business models. It's proving you've adjusted your business model to twenty-eight EU regulators. If one of them misbehaves, you now have to wage a legal fight in a foreign jurisdiction. Against those costs and risks is a minimum required revenue. If that revenue doesn't exist, it doesn't make sense to serve that market. Regardless of your business model.
If anything, major players deciding not to compete in a market is good to my mind, as a means of increasing a diversity of business styles. Laws like this make businesses pay for the actual cost of thier hidden externalities.
More seriously, GDPR should not extend beyond its jurisdiction. It does though, and there are consequences. Blocking european IPs cost (loss of revenue) must be balanced against compliance costs.
Claims that "they've had N years to prepare" are specicious, if for no other reason than they aren't bound by the specific law. Meanwhile the law introduces a new, potentially large, liability. Which results in companies self censoring by geolocation.
This is what you call an unintended consequence. Remote access to quite a few resources outside of Europe is likely to be restricted should this pass into EU law. As we like to say here, elections have consequences.
FWIW, I support the aims of GDPR, and wish we would get a sane law on this here in the US as well. But I don't want our law extending to others. That would be unfair to them.
The US is probably the biggest "exporter" of laws that are forced down the throaths of all other countries.
The problem comes when a nation decides to use those rules in a way that is detrimental to the populace or a service they see as troublesome.
The information is requested by the national GDPR enforcer so it bypasses the prevention written in the GDPR about news leaks.
Now there's a trial going around with this which blocked any further spread of that information until it's solved. It can be easily seen how the GDPR can be weaponized.
So the pretext they're using is that they want to see the information to make sure that the news organisation is not selling it or mishandling it to other third parties. In the process, they'll be able to get the information and maybe it will go to the people involved in the corruption charges (which is the head of one part of the Parliament).
For example, can't you check for all data to verify that the business is not doing anything with forbidden individuals or countries? (think OFAC)
I don't think GDPR allows anything more than any other law.
As an American who spends a lot of time in Europe, what I have noticed is that a majority of local news sites in the US block me from accessing them using IP geolocation.
law need to be tested trough time, because it will be used by the next party in power for hundreds years, whether you like the party in power or not.
the only reasonable way to reason about law is full on pessimism.
it's like we already forgot the tyranny that was going on less than a century ago and was acquired through escalating legal abuse.
It's like a factory that dumped toxic waste into a river complaining that, because of a ban on dumping toxic waste into rivers, they now "have to" dump them to nearby meadows instead, and that makes local customers unhappy.
"Detrimental effect on user experience" is an intended effect that clearly signals the company doesn't want to stop abusing its users.
The status quo where corporations make vast profits peddling ever finer-grained user data unbeknownst to the consumer with no oversight is not good. A cultural shift is necessary. I'm glad to see the EU has the stones to tackle the issue because there is zero political will stateside for any political action other than driving corporate profits masked by populist appeals to xenophobia and whatever other irrelevant distractions they can cook up.
Every business: "Stuff in here causes cancer."
Every customer: "Okay."
GPDR:
Every business: "Hey, we use cookies to provide a better experience. That okay?"
Every customer: "OK."
They're not required to unless they're using cookies for something other than providing better experience. Also, that's cookie laws, not GDPR.
It's more like:
GDPR: "We see you doing X, Y and Z which are pretty abusive. We want you to not do X, Y and Z, but if you absolutely must, you can only do that to volunteers and you can't deny service to people who do not volunteer. Oh, and it really must be opt-in."
Every business: "Hey, we do X, Y and Z. That okay? [x] no >>> [ ] <<< !! YES PRETTY PLEASE".
GDPR is a massive win for the individual.
Cookies are a separate law and entirely unrelated to GDPR.
Also the annoying "this is what we are doing, you have to agree to this to proceed" is explicitly forbidden for the GDPR. So your criticism does not apply.
Romania has already deployed GDPR as a weapon against its press [1]. I also have a short list of anecdotes of economic activity (start-ups and other new market entrants) that would have happened in the EU but, in large part due to compliance costs–including GDPR–wound up happening outside the EU.
Giving people in power broad discretion with the law and then counting on them being nice is a delicate strategy. It counts on every administration being benevolent.
> Romania could just have used another law or just made a new one to harass the press
There is a big difference between using the authority of the EU, through an EU regulation, and passing a domestic law to go after people you don't like.
More broadly, this argument can be made against any over-reaching law. Just because some hypothetical law could be bad doesn't make an ambiguous law granting widespread power to select bureaucrats okay.
I don't get it. How is GDPR an attack on general purpose computing?
Ya lost me on the reporting to the mothership thing, that is definately what many power centers would like, for example, non-DRM 3D printers that can cheaply print metal objects will be reserved for criminals in countries controlled by repressive regimes because they can make effective life saving tools.
AFAIK, no independent lawyer can sue you for violating the GDPR. Only the German regulatory body could sue them.
Now I don't know German law, as I'm not German, but it felt like they were really afraid that it could happen.
Those are all copyright-protected works. Literally everything of any substance is automatically copyrighted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...
So even reproducing the full title of a news article would likely be an infringement, and then that becomes another thing platforms take liability for/need to filter under Article 13. Whether there's a link or not would be irrelevant.
(It's meant to allow EU news publishers to bill Google and the social networks for distributing snippets/link previews of their content.)
I see this as an unreasonable reduction of previously established fair use. The fact that most of the companies linking to news articles using snippets are American, like Google and Facebook, while many news publishers involved are EU-based hints at a geopolitical motivation rather than any fundamental change to the fairness of this sort of use.
The behavior of publishers in countries where they won this battle is telling: a when laws were passed in Belgium and Spain requiring aggregators to license even small excerpts, Google stopped, and the publishers didn't take very long to offer free licenses.
[0] Here's one slightly dated example: https://www.sistrix.com/blog/new-data-is-google-or-facebook-...
Hold on, that's not true.
The intent of law matters and is codified in various ways, including stating the intent of the law directly in its text. This in turn informs judges (including appellate judges!) of how to evaluate a specific case. In jurisprudential systems, this in turn becomes case-law which further cements the intent of the law as a binding legal construct.
I agree the letter of the law is more strongly binding, but to dismiss intent as irrelevant suggests you don't understand the difference between law and computer code.
Intents may be pretenses which are cheap and mean nothing. The USSR was "for the people" and killed record ammounts of them. Even if ungrounded in displayed maliciousness a "how will this be abused" mindset is its own tradition and I argue a good thing when considering and writing laws.
Since writing a law meant to allow self defense that has text which allows shooting jaywalkers from your backyard is a bad law "to stop offenses in progress" is a bad law. Even if "reasonableness" is applied that leads to more judiciary work, uncertainty and the possibility of injust absurdities holding. Like bashing the head man who is stabbing you right now into the tile wasn't self defense because wood could have stopped him with less force. Explicit text definitions could have stopped the absurdity with say "threat of lethal force by an invading interloper may be met with lethal force" or "proportionate force" even.
I recognize EU law holds different principles but it isn't treating law as computer code. The opposite in my opinion - you are clinically paranoid if you think your compiler will try to twist your code in its favor. You are accurate when describing people and the law.
C compilers have been known to "optimize" code with undefined behavior in such a way as to introduce a security vulnerability that would not exist in the most direct translation of the C code to machine code.
I agree, but that's a matter of opinion. What's factual is that the parent post builds an argument on a false premise.
The ONLY person that can use this law is the EU executive (commission). They get to sue, essentially any site they want on the internet. You, EU citizen or not, do not get to sue anyone else, no matter how much copyright infringement, how much damage. You can politely ask the (no doubt up to 10 person) EU agency that the commission puts in charge of this law, but that's it.
The EU commission is not just the only party that can use the law, they are also arbiter of this law. They never have to build a case before court, and of course in practice this means you're declared guilty and punished before your first chance to see a court.
In other words: they can prevent any site they like from getting sued at all and they can sue any site and convict. Then you can fight that decision in court (after, of course, penalties are extracted). In court, you start from an extremely disadvantaged position: you have been tried and found guilty. Effectively, in court you only get an appeal option.
I mean I know the EU is a dictatorship (because the both the positive and negative legislative power is in exclusive hands of the executive alone, the EU commission and council: they can enact any law they like with or without parliament approval and they can prevent any law from becoming law, no matter how much parliament wants it. Or they can change it at will, or ...
But this is even worse than that. This law does not just give them dictatorial power, but essentially makes them an international public prosecutor for internet sites, who does NOT report to any elected government (only reports to the commission which is not elected).
And it will certainly be in trouble people decided to use it to post an entire Harry Potter novel and it becomes the go-to place to read it.
But Hacker News has moderators, and in practice, these posts are aren't likely to stay long, therefore fulfilling Article 13 obligations.
I'm pretty sure that movie quotes are not copyright-protected. And the last point in the article seems to be there to protects such uses explicitly.
As for the potential for abuse, I don't know, I am not a lawyer. But as I said before, it is just a directive, not a law, and it is incomplete. The spirit is all we have now, there is still a lot of work to be done on the letter.
They are almost certainly copyright protected, with copyright law provisions granted for certain fair use purposes.
Interestingly, the U.S. is slowly moving toward a more continental-style legal system while the E.U. is actually moving toward a more judge-made law system. That's because fragmented jurisdictional power in the E.U. has forced European judges (at both the national and EU level) to embrace de facto law making powers, and increasingly embracing doctrines that look exactly like stare decisis. (French-style civil law is a relatively recent development, anyhow; Europe isn't adopting the English system so much as reaching back into their own legal traditions to find a similar model of jurisprudence.)
By contrast, the bitterly partisan, winner take all politics in the U.S. has seen both the Democrats and Republicans attempt to centralize more power, both at the state and federal level. And judges, especially at the Federal level, increasingly eschew their law making role (albeit inconsistently). This is, arguably, why many common law copyright doctrines long relied upon by the open source community have begun falling to the wayside; judges increasingly prefer sticking to the strict letter of the statutes, effectively discarding the old doctrines that channeled and constrained their application.
"Judicial Conservatives" in the US disagree with "Judicial Activists" on whether (or to what extent) it is OK to creatively interpret laws (including the Constitution) to get preferred outcomes.
But all common law systems take for granted that judges fill in the inevitable gaps in the law by setting precedents. They can't just interpret it ab initio each time (which in principle is what they are supposed to do on the Continent, though I don't know about practice).
So for example, suppose a city bans anti-abortion pamphleteers from operating on the street outside an abortion clinic. Does that violate the 1st Amendment? Does it matter whether the pamphleteers are quiet or noisy? Does it matter if the exclusion zone is 10 feet vs. 1000 feet?
The text of the constitution is too compressed to answer those edge questions directly. Instead judges have come up with finer-grained rules to satisfy the general requirement of the text, and try (or claim to try) to apply them consistently. Developing these rules is lawmaking.
UPDATE: To be clear, I am very much against this law. The collateral damage will be immense. But the politicians who want this law, they simply dont care.
[0] e.g. https://www.bl.uk/business-and-ip-centre/articles/fair-use-c... for UK and https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html for US
HN does not organize large amounts of copyright-protected works, nor are the links to articles an 'upload'. If HN organized PDFs of the linked articles so you could just skip heading to a third party site then we'd be talking.
'meant' is not a dangerous word. All laws require interpretation, which is why most countries have specific interpretation guidelines for legislation and even then sometimes it takes a few cracks at the can to get it right.
That's not something 'dangerous', although it can and does go wrong from time to time. But it's a standard risk of rulemaking as it's the standard process for courts interfacing with legislation or other rule-making texts.
Comment content is governable in the site ToS, where copyright assignment or other methods of defining the respective user/site rights can be dealt with.
Even if it wasn't, your performance in posting implies consent to provide at the very least a limited license to publish content you posted.
So where's the beef here?
(1) In a hypothetical world where this law has unbounded jurisdiction
What's the scary remedy for a copyright holder if they already provided a license to publish the published content?
User posts don't make every forum into pornhub. Calm down.
The core problem this law is trying to address is that website users are, en masse, contributing content to websites when they don’t have a license to do so. This behavior is against pretty much all websites’ terms of service.
As there are many users with no money all putting illegitimate content onto a few websites with a lot of money, this law seeks to shift the burden of liability onto the websites. As a policy, it’s not completely unreasonable, but makes the mass content-farm websites like YouTube unfeasable.
The lawmakers fear for their jobs if YouTube shuts down because of their new law, so they carve out a bunch of exceptions to let key sectors of the internet continue operating (with some work to comply).
The broadest of these, implementing automated content filters, is expensive and unreliable. Operators of smaller websites, such as a typical Internet forum, have their own exception. The problem is that the boundaries here are vague and (potentially) poorly drawn, leaving sites like HN (if it were in EU jurisdiction) with a bad set of options:
* Hope nobody notices
* Accept the liability and vigorously police the site manually, probably buying insurance against a judgment
* Rely on judges allowing them the small-volume or non-profit-seeking exemptions
* Implement content filters that are expensive and a terrible user experience...? Where are you getting this?
Have you read the current copy of the draft proposal? I did.
None of the restrictions are going to kill sites like Youtube (let alone HN). The proportionality element alone makes the 'we need to invest 200% of our revenue into content blocking' myth absurd.
Will some margin need to be shunted into mitigating unauthorized distribution of works that profit the platform? Yes. But that's already the law. It's literally unjust enrichment 101.
My imagination, mostly. Note the policy being referred to in that sentence is meant to be a hypothetical one that was never actually proposed, which shifts liability without any of the safeguards. The second clause is the justification for the various limitations and exemptions bolted onto the basic concept.
> Have you read the current copy?
Not the current copy, no. Last time this came up I tried, but I had a hard time slogging through the European legalese to get to the meat, which I’m not used to reading. That’s why I’ve tried to keep my analysis here in the small, only considering the particular clause that started this discussion thread.
Given how hard it is to read, and the general unhelpfulness of the community (1), it’s probably a good assumption that effectively no one has read the actual text, and instead is relying on the reporting, which feels extremely biased to me on this one.
> The proportionality element alone makes the 'we need to invest 200% of our revenue into content blocking' myth absurd.
You should consider making this the lede instead of burying it three replies deep. This shows that the entire discussion about the other clause is moot, as there won’t be a problem in our scenario regardless of the result of that analysis.
(1) When I did ask for some help getting through the citations last time, the only substantive advice was “just skip that stuff, it doesn’t matter.” If I have learned anything, it’s that everything written into legislation matters.
As an aside, my original reply to you was simply trying to correct your statement “HN does not organize large amounts of copyright-protected works” by means of a counter-example. I think you may be reading things between my lines that aren’t there.
I am, and always have been, calm on this matter. I don’t find the situation scary in any way. I simply enjoy exploring the logical consequences of various lines of thought through the medium of writing, even to the point of playing the devil’s advocate for the purpose of a more thorough exploration of the various issues.
I’m really not sure where my opinions lie on this one, so I’ve been free-wheeling a bit more than usual. I’d like to apologize if my mental wandering caused you any distress. It was not intended.
It's just that there's a big disconnect between what people have read out of the article regarding it's applicability and what remedies actually flow out of it.
Hence the ...so what?
Large sites will have a tool like photoDNA or ContentID to be able to flag works so you can't do something like repeatedly upload something like Aquaman an hour after release. That's reasonable. With respect to a site like HN, it's highly probable the entire article literally has zero impact, unless people take to posting book chapters in comments constantly (and if that happened, you'd expect they should take action in some way).
The proportionality requirement alone alleviates almost EVERY concern people are bringing up. I don't think the legislation is perfect, but it's pretty good, fairly clear, and very easily suited to judicial interpretation to create fair results in unanticipated situations.
Which is probably non-binding or invalid in most non-US jurisdictions and does not address the problem.
> Even if it wasn't, your performance in posting implies consent to provide at the very least a limited license to publish content you posted.
That is like claiming a random user uploading Star Wars movies on youtube is no problem because that user gave them a limited license. That "license" is obviously invalid and Disney can claim copyright infringement. The proposed law now discusses whether "random user" or youtube or both are liable for this.
EU has a different jurisprudence system based on guidelines and interpretation.
There is a wide range of options philosophically. Confucian courts are even farther from what you might recognize.
So, the short version of the question, in regard to your original comment, how so..?
Fundamentally, laws have jurisdictions that they are valid in. Imposition of a law outside of a jurisdiction is problematic at best, as it enables some bad actor countries (pick and choose who you want to consider to be in this group) to export their internal battles globally.
A great example of this is the US's FATCA rules, which have resulted (at least initially) in many non-US banks denying banking options to US citizens. Due to the threat built into the law, of being unable to leverage US banking system, if they fail to comply.
As someone else commented, the road to hell is paved with "good intentions". Solutions will emerge to route around the liabilities and costs this creates, but probably not initially.
"Yipee-yi-yea...mother-fucker." ! -- Die Hard
Done :-)
If this law somehow ends up hurting multinational commercial platforms and opening up a larger space for personal blogs, hobby sites, and nonprofits, I might even consider it a good law on consequentialist grounds. I don't even care about the impact on startups if all they're trying to do is to become the next YouTube.
In reality, though, this is probably just wishful thinking. We have no idea how "organize", "promote", and "large amounts" will be interpreted; Google and Facebook will find a way to comply at least with the letter of the law; and the heyday of personal websites and ramdom phpBB forums are already well behind us :(
Anything with song lyrics or a giphy post would be in danger of additional censorship with this no?
Any kind of web site that allowed user sign ups would be in danger with this pretty much(?)
But what about fandom sites like Wikia? There's mass copyright infringement going on quite openly there, but it's survived under the understanding that e.g. Memory Alpha discussing various topics from Star Trek wasn't causing Paramount any financial harm.
But if the hosters of fan wikis like that will need to become paranoid about that liability they might not host them at all.
But maybe there'll be some meta-foundation like a fanbase version of Wikimedia that'll bring these all under their umbrella, or more likely sites like Wikia will just be hosted commercially by fans in the US blocking EU IPs and fans will need to use proxies or VPNs to browse them.
These phrases by themselves are open to interpretation in various ways. In particular, what I find dangerous is that these appear to be specific enough to convince people to believe there will be little to no room for abuse, and yet are vague enough to allow a motivated political actor to target someone if they really decided to.
A political court is essential to the european project. Absolutely essential.
As for vagueness, the issue has more to do with the scope. To me, as a citizen, the expanse of a given law is over the union of every possible interpretation of it that can be made by a reasonable person.
The more vague the language in a given law, the larger the scope for interpretation; the more specific and descriptive the language, the more restricted the scope.
It seems like an abdication of responsibility by duly elected legislators to leave the interpretation of the bounds of a vague law onto a far-removed, indirectly-elected judiciary, rather than passing specific laws defining those bounds more carefully from the get go. Why not just create a single law "Enforce good. Punish evil.", and leave it to the courts to implement?
As for why this uproar happens specifically on topics regarding the internet, the audience here on HN has a larger interest in everything to do with it compared to other issues. I do think that the same level of caution should be applied w.r.t. any and all vague laws, regardless of the topic.
Legislation is written contrariwise, which can seem baffling to programmers unfamiliar with the system.
It doesn't seem to be like this in the US. If you look at laws in the US, they try to define every word and every situation with a lot of cases. Vagueness seems to be avoided, and I'd say it actually doesn't seem too unfamiliar to programmers if used to the jargon
The real question is why people take the it's-very-common approach to belittle people's concerns.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/18/8803571/sunday-times-inte...
> GDPR: there will be no abuse
https://euobserver.com/justice/143343
> Art. 13; there will be no abuse
yeah, let's be optimistic!
Single paraphrased/modified quote from a movie, meant to mock the abuse that has, and surely will, happen, under the existing, and new regimes. Fair use, and parody all wrapped up in one sentence.
- Small organizations can't support repeatedly going to court argue that they are not "organizing" nor "promoting" content in "large" amounts.
- Small organizations can't take the path to being large that youtube or pornhub did. These now host mostly licensed content, because content producers were forced to go along. They can no longer be forced, and a barrier to entry has been thus erected.
On the other hand, it could be said that it is unfair to new companies and rewards those who _already_ broke the rules. They already broke the rules, so it would be unfair to stop them from continuing to be broken is a bad argument, but it has to be a consideration when entrenching existing companies (as they can absorb the compliance costs).
I'm not really sure what the correct answer is, as allowing an ongoing harm to continue is clearly untenable[1], but you have to ask if this is really accomplishing the ends we want to achieve, and is it the right way to do it.
[1] assuming no large-scale copyright reform, but that doesn't appear to be on the cards
Certainly the popularity of the site is due to the large amount of full scenes that have been available. Debates about who has been uploading the full scenes have been raging for years.
The debate about who is profiting from it and who has lost sales I think is pretty easy to figure out.
"internet platforms that organise and promote large amounts of copyright-protected works uploaded by their users in order to make a profit" Would include https://news.ycombinator.com as well. It does organize and promote user comments, quotes, references which are of course copyright-protected works as anything created in the EU member states is, including user comments. Now "Hacker News" does not make a direct profit of the content. It is a side-line to a profitable business. It is however trivial to argue that the fact it is a side-line by a for-profit company it must in some way contribute to that. This has been done before. The term upload does not exclude anything, because there is no legal or technical distinguishable difference between upload and post. The law could have read 'provided by their users' and the legal implications would be the same. All sites that are for profit and allow anything from their users are affected by this. This would also include online games that allow users to chat.
I don't agree that its intentions are that clear. Nobody likes a leech, but that does not mean that we should kill all animals to prevent leeches.
"And if it changes the internet as we know it today, is it that bad? It will push people to self publish instead of relying on "platforms", like the old internet."
This seems to be a call to the internet being just for the technologically savvy. No great number of people are going to self host and any form of support for people self-hosting from a for profit company will run into article 13. Moreover what I remember from the old internet is not self publishing, but the social gathering on IRC, newsgroups, etc. Something that will be impossible to do at our current scale without for profit companies or government backed services. The first will run into article 13, the second one is a non-starter.
All this will mean is that the big tech, Googles and Facebooks of the world, will solidify their position for years/decades to come since only they will have the money/resources to take care of this expensive regulation. New startups on the other hand will stand little chance in this new world.
All these regulations look good on paper. But when you understand their medium-long term ramifications is when you realize how unfairly the deck is stacked now.
I can see most of the obvious impetus for this, but don't feel it's going to work out very well at all.
I'm not sure what a smarter version of the legislation would look like.
Maybe it works out, but there is some downside risk here which involves a brand new 'lawyer economy'.
You can see this reaction to the GDPR where the discussion of benefits are hypothetical. Most of these pieces of legislation have predecessors that we can look to for real, practical results. And that practical result is that the governments have mandates to govern the internet in a large, globally-affecting, information/data-suppressing way.
> I'm not sure what a smarter version of the legislation would look like.
It would not exist. Different measures (education, funding, public services, public awareness, existing statute enforcement, accepting the costs of open information, etc) would be taken.
This legislations looks like a train wreck out of nowhere, for no real, pragmatic reason.
Of the 100 or so top issues facing Europe today, is this among them? Really?
Maybe the EU Executive should be elected, like in every other democracy.
That's not how you should write laws.
Net neutrality regulations include vague language that allows "reasonable network management", which is a multi-million dollar legal hassle that stresses small ISP owners. And I shudder to think how Duck Duck Go's programmers will manage to comply with the EU's "right to be forgotten [from a search engine's results]".
I hope the politicians in Washington, D.C. recognize that America is the world's last refuge for small business growth and economic innovation.
America isn’t free from regulatory capture, despite being historically better at innovation than either my home nation or my nation of birth.
If it's individual pages, then probably just a meta-tag?
I think robots.txt could be leveraged for this though maybe.
Yes, they don't have their own crawler for regular websites. They get their organic search results from Bing and Oath.
Implementing regulations for every company as if they are the same is what is absurd here.
There is a difference between making a law that punishes wrongful use of information and then forcing companies to do things a certain way. That's the point here which seems to be missed on most.
What is insane is putting in regulation in areas like this instead of just punishing people for mis-conduct.
So in theory yes, in reality I am doubtful.
Personally, I don't think laws should discriminate like this, and if a law is not good for business overall, it should be shuttered, not targeted. There are exceptions of course, but I don't think there should be on the internet (or information in general).
Keep in mind that mostly we are ADDING regulation not removing with which means that existing companies get the benefit of not having had to deal with the same when they were small.
This is the real problem.
https://www.pymnts.com/news/security-and-risk/2018/gdpr-goog...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/23/google-ow...
While small sites with a handful of staff, can't do that. People may subscribe for big sites like Facebook and Youtube , but they won't subscribe separately for a lots of small sites.
So blocking ads helps eliminating the small guys while the whales can deal with it.
Not true, they also help the end users, who often get lost in these discussions of big-vs-small companies. Turns out these "whales" everyone is so anxious to target provide benefits to end users, who are often the ones that end up bearing the brunt of the pain.
Well, who do you think wrote it? Not the fish.
In many ways the EU is a functioning technocracy, and if you ever read through the actual EU documents it shows. They are almost always sound, they are also massively bureaucratic and around 90% longer than necessary, but I’ve never read through something that wasn’t sound.
Disclaimer: I haven’t read up on article 13, but I do read (and sit through) a good deal of EU standards and proposals for EU wide Enterprise Architectural principles, and they are never thwarted by politics.
Sound in respect to very general interpretations and "common sense". The problem is that general laws can touch topics that are way beyond common sense, the room of interpretation is then just so big that it's like a weapon to take out anybody if you only dig deep enough and frame it as a problem for the common good.
however, it is a good thing. youtube has always been a massive for-profit piracy operation, and they just license and pay the people who are big enough to threaten them. all small content creators get the shaft. even google search is mostly a form of piracy. taking other people's content and slapping ads on it.
google needs to die and it is nice to see the EU helping here.
Maybe apple,
They are the winners, not the losers here.
As you say the small start-ups in Berlin & Paris are left in the dust because only the big ones have the resources to take care of this bureaucratic horse-manure.
In the long run we'll continue to dig our own graves while China and the US laughs.
This one's a double edged sword.
In this example, Youtube or Facebook will have more resources to (automatically) detect copyright content than a small content-oriented startup.
This only increases "barriers to entry" for new companies and strengthens the position of incumbents.
According to the article, politicians initially addressed the problem:
> TBC Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
but this at risk of being dropped:
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
At best it will create a divergent protectionist demense while doing nothing to aid viability outside the market - and its help inside is dubious. Even outright banning Google and Facebook won't suddenly make Bing and Yahoo the next big thing. At best they will be the postum to the real coffee.
Punitive measures on information like this rarely encourage anything. The worst part is people look at the intent and potential effects of legislation as though it is the actual, realized result. I have to assume the reason is a mix of naive optimism, anti-big-web-tech, and the inability to take the bad with the good so e feel obligated to keep shaping things. Real, actual teaching and encouraging and efforts and money and motive and all of that is far different from what's happening here.
Yes, it' a strategy of their failing commercial entities to wring a profit out of entities like FB and G who they think are profiting.
Of course it's among the worst strategies available.
What they need is more innovation, not more regulation.
Following a number of important amendments being made to the Copyright Directive since July, the proposal was put to a plenary vote in September, which over 60% of MEPs supported. During further negotiations between Parliament, the Council (EU Member States) and the European Commission, any remaining shortcomings can be addressed.
I am in favour of a balanced Copyright Directive that allows for a free and fair internet, and also ensures the fair remuneration of creators, artists, publishers and journalists who create important jobs, growth and innovation in the EU.
With regard to a stronger right for press publishers, Article 11 allows for: • Fair remuneration for journalists and press publishers for the use of their articles. • Financially independent press (independent from platforms). • Quality journalism. • Journalists to get a share of the press publishers' remuneration. Private use of press articles is allowed. Hyperlinking is allowed.
With regard to the value gap, Article 13 allows for: • Platforms to take more responsibility for the content on their websites. • Fair remuneration for European right holders (artists, musicians, authors etc.) from the platforms that use their works. • Platforms to conclude licenses with the right holders. • Right holders and platforms to find a practical solution to bring copyright and liability in a better balance. The scope of Article 13 has been limited to those platforms which infringe the most copyright. Platforms like Spotify, iTunes, Netflix, eBay, Wikipedia, dating-platforms, software developing platforms, blogs, private homepages, dropbox etc. do not fall under Article 13.
Copyright rules need to reflect the new realities and business models of the 21st century, particularly the rise of digital media. Press publishers and other content producers should receive a fair share for the use of their content on the internet. Currently, most generated revenue goes to the platforms and aggregators, such as Google, Facebook, YouTube.
It is of course a priority that the Internet remains a platform where free speech prevails. The rules will only affect platforms that explicitly make profit from copyrighted works. Private individuals can continue to share content on the internet for non-commercial purpose. Platforms such as universities, scientific databases and online encyclopaedias, which are not dealing with copyright content as their primary purpose, will all be exempt from the new rules.
_________________
Good talk from a few weeks ago: https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_...
(that's just android, but they do just as much web tracking through their pixel for example).
The regulation itself forbids their main income source
FB has to show who they sell data to, that's the new part basically. They will probably show a long list of random companies. It'll look a bit scary, people will get accustomed to it. (FB will find a dark pattern that minimizes the attrition due to any permission/consent step in their money machine.)
The identifiable information still has to be encrypted. They still need to specify exactly where the information will go and why. And if a new company wants to access the data or even wants to use the provided Information for something new, Facebook has to ask permission again. Once again telling the user why that company needs permission and why as well.
It's doubtful that the current blanket prompt is enough. But it remains to be seen wherever the law will be enforced and it's of course possible,that nothing will change and regulator's never act on the law
That said, I hope the EU courts will look at them the first time they fuck up. (And that might be right now. But so far I'm not aware of any recent FB data/privacy abuse.)
All these big blanket OK consent buttons we see on landing pages have already been shown in court do not constitute informed and freely given consent. The real impact has het to come, hopefully after some stiff fines are handed.
And you are right: I also wonder about enabling large scale VAT dodging by sites like aliexpress.
Even if you are, I'm not actually sure that would be better for anyone involved. Seems like it would essentially stop or severely diminish online commerce between US/EU as too much hassle.
GDPR did not really change the media landscape in the EU. Business as usual here. Mostly companies went through a brief period where they had to consult lawyers and expensive agencies on how to cover their asses. Mostly good things have started happening after that. Some companies that were doing technically unacceptable things under pre-GDPR legislation have now grudgingly stopped doing those things.
This is pre-GDPR, but it feels like since GDPR there's been a real uptick in this.
Of course, I’ve seen even more that give you only an accept option... that, or as sibling commenter said yes/wilderness of options.
because if the tracking/ad/shit/any cookies are not fundamentally required for the page to show, then denying you the usage of the site is a violation of your privacy (because you can't give selective consent to specific data uses)
sure, a lot of sites throw up the ugly banner, but now you can click fuck cookies, because fuck cookies if you only want to read a fucking HTML page with pictures. they can still make stats about your visit and aggregate them, but tracking cookies are absurd. (they can filter out repeated visits by looking at IP addresses and browser fingerprinting and/or they can ask you nicely to help them get better stats, but now they have to unbundle that from the ad tracking purpose.)
This button doesn't exist in 90% of cases. Websites tend to dump you into a complex, deliberately tedious to edit options UI rather than providing a "No" button.
Their are major complaints outstanding against Google, Facebook & the IAB that will define how online publishers can be funded once they are litigated.
It's like saying that criminal laws prevented people from getting happily scammed.
Article 13 is fundamentally different from the GDPR. The fundamental problem is that I think (and most people hopefully do) user privacy is an ethical good, and I don't believe (much of) copyright law is an ethical good. If you fundamentally believe copyright must be defended vigilantly Article 13 is not an unreasonable consequence at all - I just don't agree with that premise one bit.
Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too. But for Article 13, the laws are only in the interest of big corporations. I don't care about those.
Besides, there is also a cost to me: the never-ending pop-ups and acceptance dialogues, inability to access information in a straightforward manner for those that choose to block, etc.
What is the percentage of users who actively control their privacy as a result of GDPR (and still happily use the website)? What is the percentage of badly -behaving businesses who will be prosecuted?
The law doesn't ask for any popups, blocking is a dumb option that not many take, and for prosecutions we'll have to wait a bit longer before we see.
> There is a cost to businesses in complying with and implementing regulations, regardless of the size of the business and how good or bad their behaviour has been with respect to the intention of those regulations. You can't deny over-regulation by assuming only the badly-behaving people are burdened by it.
Indeed - the lack of this cost of business was causing (1) reckless and (2) (deeply) unethical behaviour to become rampant [0]. I think it was fair to say it was not acceptable anymore, and I think the GDPR does a good job of formalizing rules of basic common sense about personal data protection. There's really nothing in the GDPR that I can point to that is overbearing, although of course many businesses do implement unnecessarily overbearing UX on top of it.
Processing personal data should be a risk to business, and I think some basic rule of law was warranted for this risk to be clear to business.
I'm not saying there is no cost to regulation. But the cost needs to be proportional to the good it achieves and I think the GDPR does that quite well. Article 13 - in my opinion - clearly will not.
[0]: E.g. in unregulated countries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684
I don't. I find it an egregious example of over-regulation. I think not recognizing the obviously large scope of such regulation is extremely suspect.
> The GDPR does a good job in codifying basic privacy principles of what you can do with personal data
By what measure do you define "good job"?
> The only reason to call it over regulation is if you're spoiled about not being regulated beforehand
I admit being this kind of spoiled. But it's ridiculous to say that's the only reason. There are measured ways to go about things and to so blatantly say that this is the only reason one might view it as over-regulation (despite real reasons such as size and scope and ineffectiveness of predecessors/enforcement) destroys our ability to have real conversations about the many alternative ways to solve some of the problems we have. Such a black-and-white absolutist view is harmful.
> I don't understand why I hear so few Americans about wanting this in their own country.
Can't speak for all, but for many, it's because they recognize the difference between what would be ideal and what would actually happen. Large anti-company (especially against companies that users prefer to use) laws have a chance to be frowned upon, despite ridiculous promises/optimism/naivete by the hopeful.
> Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR, I say good riddance. If you really feel you cannot uphold the basic privacy principles posited, then screw you too.
These are not how chilling effects work. You don't get to say "well, if they choose not to do business where a law is, they must not be able to uphold that law". There are compliance costs/risks. The amount of assumptions concerning this topic, whether assumptions that the law is good or assumptions that those disagreeing with it are of a certain ilk, need to stop. You only hurt your cause discussing things in this manner.
If you have specific problems with GDPR or that it goes too far, I'd like to know what those specific aspects are. In my view, there's some basic rules on how to deal with personal data that the GDPR codifies, and it does that surprisingly (for the EU) reasonably. It starts from simple principles of citizen rights and ethical behaviour and writes a complete rulebook on how to apply them - that's my definition of a good job.
It might be difficult for business to adapt to actually now considering processing personal data a risk. But that by itself does not make GDPR "overregulation" - that just makes it a difficult regulation change to process. I won't shed a tear about business having a difficult time going through that process - I'm incredibly happy that they are forced to consider processing personal data a risk, because it is.
Also note I specifically said "Websites that don't want to comply with GDPR" - not "Companies that are not sure they can comply with GDPR yet". There's a reasonable difference, I agree. But, yes, if you find that your business intrinsically cannot comply with GDPR or you don't want to - it's time to take a good hard look in the mirror.
No idea if such a thing would happen though.
And as sad as the damage of current internet culture will be, there are many potential unintended consequences that may be - at least - interesting.
Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.
Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.
[0]: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A better question is why not Spanish?
This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.
It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.
Every language is irregular because humans are irregular, but I don't think it is justified to paint English as somehow more difficult than other languages. The difficulty of a language just depends on the languages you already know, prior exposure, available resources to learn it etc - and the last two of these are typically much better for English than most other languages.
Male
> or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.
14 cases (rules) are much easier to remember that thousands of specific cases.
However I'm just looking at my kids that are tri-lingual at the moment with fourth in the works and they prefer to use English even though we actively force them to speak my wife's and my native languages at home... which are of European group too, so not even close in complexity to Chinese or Arabic. English has less exceptions, there is no conjugation, no gender-specific adjective forms, not that many verb tenses, etc. It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
EDIT: You edited your comment, so:
> English has less exceptions
Where? Verb tenses form essentially at random.
> It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.
I disagree. It might not have conjugation, genders, etc, but it managed to more than make up for the lack of complexity with superb amounts of complexity in spelling, phrasal verbs, irregular verbs, etc.
I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.
My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).
The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.
As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.
German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).
There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.
- Because English already has a great momentum (with the number of speakers of English as a second language, pop culture and the Internet)?
It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).
There’s still the Irish.
Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
TLDR: In an optimistic estimate, to stop 300 illegitimate copyright infringing posting, we would have to block 150.000 non-infringing posts.
Whoever suggests this as a policy, must have received serious payoffs to close their eyes for the overwhelmingly negative effects this law will have.
Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy. The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).
Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments.
In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).
That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.
This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.
I don't think this will happen, but if this is actually made into a liability then this would create a rather interesting situation where a platform could be sued for blocking fair use content and miss-identified content.
That and a load of innovative start-ups simply setting up overseas instead of inside Europe, and perhaps major sites simply preventing any kind of contribution from European users.
After all, there's no A13 clause which says that if your US site allows uploads, your European one also has to?
EDIT: Intending to provide a more useful response now, here are links from the post above to the articles[1] and recitals[2] of the current negotiations. I'm seeing relevant platform liability language in the row labeled 239. While marked for continued discussion, the proposed language is concerning to me:
"Licensing agreements which are concluded by online content sharing service providers
with right holders for the acts of communication referred to in paragraph 1...,
shall cover the liability for works uploaded by the users of such online content sharing services
in line with the terms and conditions set out in the licensing agreement,
provided that such users do not act for commercial purposes."
More importantly i have never, ever heard of any local IT unions or societies being involved in the process of legislating these laws (same thing for GDPR). I don't believe this law will change things radically in europe, although i m a little worried with all this predatory lawmaking against US companies. The main issue remains that europe produces very little online (No european-superheroes memes? big whoop)
I think I'd have a bigger chance of meeting a unicorn than a member of a "IT union".
Am I reading correctly that when you have a forum (e.g. Discourse) which is non-commercial i.e. for an open community, that any users uploading stuff or quoting article sections are exempt from this regulation (even though the forum is hosted on Discourse servers on a paid plan)?
If huge content distribution platforms like YouTube and Facebook are not viable anymore, it might put a renewed wind in the sails of self-hosting systems. Getting the Internet back to it's distributed nature would make it more resilient.
> the sails of self-hosting systems
Self-hosted content is pointless if there are no watercoolers to chat about it.
I wish we had the kind of concerted effort that the copyright lobby is able to launch, but focused on issues that reduce the net benefit of these platform more than copyright infringement: hate speech or intentional misinformation.
Social networks.
I can imagine someone writing a TOR-based eMule client or something along those lines but it won't be anywhere near as common as it was back in the days; ease of use has always been an important factor and today we actually do have commercial alternatives in place this time.
As I see it, the main impact will be for social networks and other sites that allow user uploads. There's an actual chance the people behind the law simply don't understand that what they're asking isn't possible, and that many politicians think we just need to solve this with blockchains and machine learning (because that's apparently how to fix everything nowadays). In the real world, however, I really see no way to comply with that law without mass-monitoring and very far-reaching automatic censorship of uploaded content.
How is the platform going to know what's legally published and what isn't? In some cases I suppose you can work with an industry, like YouTube's Content ID for music, however even with Google's resources Content ID still has severe glitches[1] (should they be legally responsible for false positives too?). Otherwise what, hire an army of mechanical turks to manually review every single thing that's uploaded?
At best I think under this kind of system you're going to get a stagnant landscape where only corporate giants with deep pockets and/or industry connections can create new innovative products. There's going to be no more upstart Instagrams, Snapchats, Soundclouds, whatever if the company can get sued into oblivion if some rando takes a pic or uploads a snippet of copyrighted material.
[1]: https://twitter.com/SmellyOctopus/status/1082771468377821185
Can you elaborate on why this is occurring in an illegal fashion? UsedSoft v Oracle [1] and Aleksandrs Ranks and Jurijs Vasiļevičs [2] seem to broadly suggest that reselling used software is legal.
[1] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=124...
[2] http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=184...
There is also too much content to check and enforce it all.
There are bazillions of other sites who don’t (and often can’t) police anything of what they host unless they are threatened with litigation.
(I don't blame them to be fair, I've gone down the MEP route - they replied with a form letter to the effect of "this is party policy and I'll support it because it's for your own good, and I'm not discussing it further")
Honest question here: What can I do to influence this decision?
Mmm...maybe you could write to your local/nearest European Parliament Representative...I think they call them MEPs...
LOL...why though? By the way...which country is that?
Just look on all the big countries of the world, they all kind of suck. There is simply no way for ordinary citizens to have any effect on EU because of it's size alone. Almost all my countries MEPs voted no to Article 13 but it still got passed.
I don't want Germany and France to control Sweden (which is the country I'm from).
Guess who is going to sell content-filter-as-a-service?
> Platforms run by startups (small and micro-sized businesses) are exempted from the law.
> This was one of the European Parliament’s main improvements to the text. Unfortunately, it is now in danger of being dropped in negotiations.
In some parts of the EU that's already illegal. Not just a civil tort for which you can be sued, but an actual criminal offence for which you can be prosecuted.
Which would you prefer?
of course not don't be silly.
but so far liability was on the uploader, when the police comes knocking you gave out user data and that was it. see, for example, the jsfiddle constant issue with illegal content: https://remysharp.com/2015/09/18/jsbin-toxic-part-5
people miss here that any user generated content could be part of a copyright. even text if they are lyrics. there's NO user platform that's safe.