EU businesses sign open letter against copyright directive articles 11 and 13 | Hacker News Reader

EU businesses sign open letter against copyright directive articles 11 and 13

nextcloud.com

223 pointszoobab21 comments

Signed. Here is the link to add your signature: https://nextcloud.com/press/pr20190319

What I find odd about the protest against this is that it is mostly coming from Germany. Why is France not protesting against this more?

Great question! I don’t know France that well. Perhaps there are no IT companies in France dealing with user content in a significant way? Perhaps debate on the matter is stifled by incompetent media not understanding questions of importance that would make them realise how important news about this is?

I would argue that it is maybe even worse, as there is a potential conflict of interests of our main press agency, AFP, about this topic, as they are a huge proponent of Article 11. French media are very reliant on that news agency, so we don't hear about the protests about it, and the public do not care.

It doesn't help that our main EFF-equivalent, La Quadrature du Net, didn't have a very clear position about the copyright directive at some point [0].

[0] https://www.nextinpact.com/news/107093-directive-droit-daute...

Dailymotion is French. Funny, because I often find videos on Dailymotion that we're copy-struck on YouTube.

The French government is very much for Articles 11 and 13, while the German govt ... can't make up their minds. One of the German coalition parties is against, including the justice minister, but she still voted in favour of it. Quoting this [1]:

> Wenn Barley im Kabinett nicht zugestimmt hätte, hätte sich Deutschland im Kreis der EU-Staaten enthalten müssen –- dann wäre die nötige Mehrheit nicht zustande gekommen.

Translated:

> If Barley had not agreed in the cabinet, Germany would have had to abstain in the circle of EU states -- then the necessary majority would not have been achieved.

The French government is so much for the directive that the French ambassador even tried to convince SPD party members... which is diplomatically very impolite, you don't just meddle with interior politics of another country [2].

[1]: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/EU-Copyright-Artikel...

[2]: https://netzpolitik.org/2019/frankreich-draengt-spd-abgeordn...

There were some rumors that Germany giving in here is a high level backroom deal to secure French support for the gas pipeline in the Baltic sea linking Russia and Germany (which the US are opposed to).

Thx for the reply, but it doesn't really answer the question: Why is the French government so uniformly for this reform and why are there no demonstrations against this in France, while at the same time in Germany this is a pretty dividing issue.

Does the French use and understand the internet differently? Do they have more trust on the government to not mess this up? Or do they currently just have different, more pressing, issues on their mind?

I wonder if the fact that France, and the French government, have a very protectionist approach to their own culture factors into this. Anything that limits the power of the US to spread its 'culture' is seen as a net win.

If you're talking about the people, I would say that pretty much no one here (talking about the average guy), heard about article 11 and 13

Too late my friend, we already achieved to kill most of our startup ecosystem and made fly away any kind of entrepreneurship. And not only about internet-related businesses but in a broader way.

Now we are just trying to export our brillantly superior ideas.

If Belgium is any indication, there has been a strong lobbying from the French-speaking media for Article 11. They've been unsuccessfully trying to "extort" money from Google News for years now [1] (in French). Article 11/13 will be just another avenue to do that.

[1] https://www.lesoir.be/art/google-sanctionne-la-presse-franco...

Due to reordering article 13 is now article 17: https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1109153304964222976

I don't know for sure but it seems to be mostly music copyright companies pushing for articles 11 and 13. There reasoning seems a bit unclear but then again music licensing are some bizarre aspects to it. But I think it's important to understand the who and why behind articles 11 & 13 in order to understand what the proposed issue is. It's not unlikely that the media and copyright industry would try to reach farther than they need either intentially or unintentially due to misunderstanding the technical details.

For the first example, The British Phonographic Institute (BPI) has a statement argueing that big tech companies, under current safe harbor laws, are allowed to profit off user uploaded content if it contains music. The statement says:

> This so called “safe harbour” from liability means that sites can provide a vast global jukebox of music whilst arguing they don't even need to negotiate a licence to do so.

I can't think of a single site that operates in this manner. Besides upload filters, Youtube allows copyright holders to flag videos for copyright violation. Does this work differently in the EU than the US currently? The system seems to be very effective to the point that it's abuse is widely critized. Are other sites currently implementing a subpar system? Are there EU hosted sites that are currently providing these "global jukebox's" ? I guess I haven't seen a single online site in a while that provides unlicensed music in the manner that BPI describes. The best example was Grooveshark but that's been defunct for years.

https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/bpi-brit-awards-ceo-geof...

I don't think money would be spend on lobbying if they didn't think there would be a return; therefore there must be some industry, site, or platform that EU copyright holders think they can extract rent from or push more people into buying music. Given that the most likely form of music copyright infringement is having music in the background of a video uploaded to some social media site, I guess it seems that copyright holders are after the ad revenu of user-generated/uploaded content sites (Facebook, Reddit, etc). If their music appears in the background of a video, they want a slice of the ad-revenue the site collects. But I think many sites would opt to just muting the audio (like Twitch already does).

If videos with background music are the major target of this legislation and would impact any site that allows users to upload videos, the expense of building an identification system and forking over a portion of the ad-revenue is likely less than using ML to selectively remove/replace the background music while leaving other sounds in-tact. In the short term I expect sites to just mute copyright infringing portions.

> mostly music copyright companies pushing for articles 11 and 13

bit simplistic thinking, but this in itself is enough to take a stance against the articles

Especially Article 13 is dangerously experimenting with the core foundation of the Internet’s ecosystem. Making companies directly liable for the content of their users forces these businesses to make billions of legal decisions about the legality of content. Most companies are neither equipped nor capable of implementing the automatic content filtering mechanisms this requires, which are expensive and prone to error.

Crap grammar and rubbish sentence construction, whilst opining, will rarely make friends.

The letter is a dreadful example of how to not plead a case. It has several bold sections that are are shouty - use italics instead.

Although the purpose of these regulations is to limit the powers of big US Internet companies like Google or Facebook, This may be true but again it is not the way to take the moral high ground. Do you have proof of that assertion?

If I was one of those 130 businesses and was charged for that letter then I would feel seen off. I do own a small business in the UK and I will not put my tiny weight behind that rubbish. I acknowledge some of the issues mentioned are potentially a problem but the message is garbled so badly as to be unusable.

Keep calm and pedant on.

I see you're a novice to legal-ese, while pedantically forming your opinion based on... Sentence construction? Not the content?

I guess we'll just have to deal with a Europe without memes. We'll see only slower, mass-market-only creators on the internet. The small businesses, the artists, the actual innovators will have no seat at the table... because you cannot wrap you head around a multi-clause sentence.

If you're going to be that American about this, you can keep your Brexit.

On the off chance that you're here to learn instead of just quasi-Schrute-ing on everything? I would suggest you watch a couple documentaries: "Rip: A Remix Manifesto," and "Everything is a Remix," to learn how creativity works. Any efforts to restrict derivative works, such as from these small outlets, demolishes the human ability to create. These are creative commons works, so I trust you to find them without having to buy a DVD/bluray.

"Although the purpose of these regulations is to limit the powers of big US Internet companies like Google or Facebook"

This has been stated very explicitly by the law makers, so yeah, it wasn't hard to state that. I'm not even going to bother searching for that.

Over 210 companies have signed, as of now, and I still have quite a backlog of signatories to add.

Sorry that the English isn't perfect, it was not written by native speakers.

> The letter is a dreadful example of how to not plead a case.

Maybe you should reread your own comment, and apply your own advice.

Using things like "crap" and "rubbish" doesn't indicate that you would do a better job at writing that letter.

EU businesses sign...

Isn't this more accurately "Some EU businesses sign..."

Form what I know about Article 13 from HN, it was created at the behest of a group of EU businesses.

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