I find it hard to understand how anyone can think this law is a good idea.
Who exactly are they claiming to protect?
Who exactly are they claiming to protect?
So the leverage that the average EU voter has is only applicable at one very narrow point in the process (the vote to approve), while lobbyists can always buy influence with the lawmakers all they way through the process.
And this is the result. Though it does have to be said that the same process came up with the GDPR and that was a decent (and necessary) piece of legislation.
I do wonder why FAANG aren't more active lobbying the EU, though
They are quite active. I.e. Google is said to have spent 30+ millions on lobbying about the copyright reform. Facebook is lobbying too: https://www.politico.eu/article/inside-story-facebook-fight-... (although not necessarily as one would think from their public statements, it seems like they're quite happy to tout how effective upload filters are when it seems like they can use that as an argument to avoid other rules)
Here's an in-depth factual analysis of copyright lobbying:
> The limited information which is available about lobby meetings shows the intense level of lobbying taking place on the Copyright Directive, but it also interestingly exposes that the biggest lobbies were not in fact big tech companies and their associates, as many headlines claimed, but the publishers, creative industries and collecting societies.
https://corporateeurope.org/power-lobbies/2018/12/copyright-...
I think they know that article 13 is going to be beneficial for them. If law requires costly content ID, it will make half of companies go out of business or non profitable in Europe. I really think many companies are going to ignore Europe as a whole.
There's another approach that is less legally certain. Build up users in both the US and EU, and only monetize the US users while entirely ignoring all EU law. You allow EU citizens to sign up, and do not place any infrastructure in the EU or do any business there initially. Jurisdiction will be in the US. The monetized US users, which will remain lucrative, subsidize building out into the EU member state markets without any revenue generation. You capture the EU userbase in this approach, then later comply with EU law and monetize that userbase after you're compliant. Would work best for ad platform businesses like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
If I'm operating a service in eg Brazil, I have zero obligation to comply with EU law (depending on treaties of course), nor do I have any responsibility to block EU citizens from signing up for my service. Let the EU users come in, comply with EU law later when you have to in order to monetize the market. Retro fines are one potential concern at scale, however that ends up being the equivalent of a speeding ticket and you own the market.
One of the mistakes that keeps being made by EU tech promoters, is thinking that they should be concerned with competing with the existing US mega platforms (such that the EU needs to build a search engine to rival Google, photo platform to rival Instagram, mobile platforms to rival iOS or Android, etc). That battle was over a decade ago or more in some cases. The focus has to be on the next inflection point opening that allows for a creation of the next mega platforms. With platforms and the Internet, if you don't capture the US market first, the winner in that market will almost always smash you (or buy you) unless you bar access to your market as in the case of China. That's due to the enormous monetary value of capturing the US market (and you pretty much get Canada with it automatically, a $1.7 trillion economy), it acts as a perpetual well of resources to over-spend on then divide and conquering other markets like the EU.
this is not actually true. There are lots of examples, but the best two are probably:
Yahoo (a US company operating entirely in the US) being forced to stop users from selling Nazi memorabilia because it's illegal in France.
Kim Dotcom fighting extradition to the US from New Zealand, for Mega. Everything he did is perfectly legal in New Zealand, but that doesn't seem to matter to the US legal system.
If your service reaches EU customers, then the EU will apply their laws to your service. If you break those laws, then you may find yourself facing legal problems (extradition if available, from Brazil or any country you travel to that has an extradition treaty with the EU).
Funny you say that. I'd say it's just the same kind of shitshow - badly written, vague (case in point: if Google's layers can't safely parse GDPR, nobody stands a chance to have certainty: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191591/google-gdpr-fine...), entirely unnecessary, isolating EU from the rest of the world behind the new Great European Firewall. Not a day passes that I wouldn't encounter a site that geoblocks EU visitors because they don't want to deal with the uncertainty of GDPR. Expect much more of that if Article 13 passes.
Great for VPN services, though.
You have no idea of the communist and fascist tendencies the EU is riddled it. They just use the enhancements of living standards that the high productivity afforded by modern technology to cover their real goals.
British people have a very good nose for this bullshit that is why they voted for Brexit.
Leopards never change their spots. The human leopards only paint them over.
What you see is a significant proportion of the business and political establishment and the media trying to make out that the people who voted for Brexit regret it. They don't.
Quite simply the voters did not vote for a deal. The voted for an exit, and the Prime Minister and her cohorts are trying to get a deal from the EU that the voters did not ask for.
At its heart Brexit was a political choice. The voters just wanted out, and instead of accepting the decision and planning for Article 50, they have spent the last 2 years wrangling for some deal Brexiteers did not ask for, and now that time is up they are at a complete loss as to what to do.